


Rewrite the Stars

by gAERU_sINkuu



Series: Canes Venatici [1]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Gen, Original Character(s), Other, Self-Insert
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-12-11
Updated: 2019-01-18
Packaged: 2019-09-16 07:20:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 21,225
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16949523
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gAERU_sINkuu/pseuds/gAERU_sINkuu
Summary: Life is meant to be lived.When she was born again, the fact that the world is fictional and might not be at all real doesn’t mean she’s going to squander this chance away. Self-insert, OC.





	1. One

**Author's Note:**

> This fanfic was originally written for NaNiWriMo, but I decided to post it here. Comments and suggestions would be appreciated. :)
> 
> The fic is written in the 3rd person POV.

She took only one bite of her friend’s homemade sandwich to briefly appease her growling stomach because there’d be a snack bar when they get to the movie theatre; she didn’t want to waste her appetite but she hadn’t had lunch and the persisting gnawing in her abdomen made her complain loudly to her friend in shotgun that if traffic didn’t speed up soon, she was going to die of hunger.

That didn’t happen.

It takes thirty days or more to die from hunger.

_What the hell was in that sandwich?_

_I thought you were allergic to cashew. This is almond butter!_

_They’re the same fuckin—fu—_

_Chels?_

Chelsea Carter died under thirty minutes.

She could not be sure if it was anaphylactic shock proper or if she had accidentally floored the accelerator when she tried to brake and wrapped her car in an intimate embrace with another vehicle or suffocated on the airbag when she passed out from the allergic reaction—or if a meteorite crashed through the roof of the car and brained her even.

Chelsea could not be sure she even _died_. She might’ve just passed out from the lack of oxygen.

Was death not the final end? Everyone seemed sure but this—this did not feel like the end.

It felt as if the world had barely been sucked into a black, suffocating, silent void when it exploded outward, like turning on the blender without the lid: its contents spewed in a hazardous mess all over.

And Chelsea was one of the void’s contents.

She was thrown _hard_ —or felt like she was thrown but could’ve just been the sensation of a prolonged, escalated hypnic jerk—and the impending crash, the promise of pain, ripped a frightened scream out of her mouth. Yet, it was an infant's wailing cry that sounded closest to ear, that reverberated from her chest.

Her limbs felt shrunken and small, and despite the futility of it, she flailed them wildly at confusion, trying to bat it away, and her body curled into itself so that she was but a mangled thing forced into a small vessel.

Chelsea didn’t stop screaming, raw and new, until her back felt the scratchy sensation of a rough type of fabric. She calmed marginally, sucking back the tears to realise she had landed, ceased falling or had never fallen at all. Her irrational fear was dispelled but the confusion remained. She struggled to see; her eyes felt wide open but it was dark, blurry, and she had to rely on her other senses. The distant sound of car honks reached her ears, an unpleasant stench of days-old rubbish made her nose crinkle, and glass rattled in the wind close by. Her wild squirming rustled fabric that scratched unpleasantly at her skin.

She tried to sit up but found her body stubbornly uncooperative and heavy. Uneasy and panicky, she channelled energy to her hands to push herself up but only succeeded in jerking her hands. She struggled to roll over, to find strength in her feet to stand, drew breath to scream for her friend, for a stranger, to help.

A strange, infantile noise tore from her throat.

Startled, Chelsea clasped a hand to her mouth, only to bump her closed fist to it. A fist that felt slick with a liquid that reeked of bloody copper. Tongue flicking over empty gums, panic surging like a tidal wave, she stuffed her fist into her mouth to ascertain her hand’s size, running her tongue over the length of the digits.

Disoriented as she was, she could already tell—the hand was too small, fingers too short, and the liquid coating the fist was most certainly blood.

Chelsea pulled her hand out of her mouth and cried out. The infant’s cry was the one she had heard before—the voice that greeted her after the void.

Her own voice.

“Hush,” the voice came from nowhere. Chelsea’s skeletal structure jolted under her skin. She hadn’t known there was someone nearby, and she had never been so acutely aware of her vulnerability in the face of malice. She didn’t recognise the voice, which was husky enough to be ambiguous – either a man’s or a woman’s.

Chelsea obeyed the command to be quiet, only because she wanted to hear what he or she was doing. There was a strangely familiar sound that reminded her of her grandmother’s house, of a phone from the old days where phoning someone involved a snail-slow spin of the dial.

She yelped when a clear, cool voice resounded in the enclosed space, booming as if the woman was yelling in her ear: “Welcome to the Ministry of Magic, visitor. Please state your name and business.”

_Ministry of Magic…?_

After eating almond butter and having an allergic reaction to it, Chelsea thought maybe she was just hallucinating, or dreaming. Anytime now she’d wake up in the hospital.

“I, ah …” What was the matter? The person hesitated then stopped completely.

“Thank you,” said the cool female voice, the operator. The stranger in the enclosed space exhaled audibly. Who _was_ this person? What was she, Chelsea, even doing here with this stranger? “Visitor, please take the badge and attach it to the front of your robes.”

 _Robes, she definitely said robes_ , thought Chelsea, starting to get as numb to bewilderment as her digits were in the cold. _I’m not mishearing things, right?_

Chelsea heard a clean-cut click sound and a continuous rattling of metal before something pinged close to her head: something small and metallic by the sound of it had fallen next to her. Chelsea couldn’t turn her head and her periphery didn’t provide much visual information. Apparently only her ears were functioning in this critical situation.

“Visitor to the Ministry, you are required to submit to a search and present your wand for registration at the security desk, which is located at the far end of the Atrium. Security guards shall escort you. Your cooperation in this time of violence and strife is much appreciated.”

Maybe the anaphylactic shock had deprived her brain of oxygen for a second too long to salvage the part of the brain that controlled conscious thought and sanity, but a lucky minute short of death.

The floor of the surface she laid on shuddered.

She heard footsteps scrambling away from her. _Wait!_ She wanted to shout but only managed a wet gurgle, and her limbs kicked in protest at the stranger’s hasty exit. She heard a door swinging shut, rattling glass. _Don’t leave me! I need answers! Help me!_

The floor sank further and further until the scant light that Chelsea had been relying on disappeared. She was sunk into total darkness. She started to really cry: she couldn’t see, she couldn’t move and couldn’t cry for help. Her increasingly loud wailing drowned out the grinding noise typical of elevators descending and ascending. Then, light flooded her limited sight. While the descent into darkness had been slow and subtle, the light appeared abruptly. Chelsea drew a much needed breath that ended in a hiccup as she calmed.

“The Ministry of Magic wishes you a pleasant day,” said the familiar cool voice of the operator. _I could use some pleasant in my day_ , thought Chelsea grumpily. There was a shudder as the elevator—box, phone booth, whatever—jerked to a halt, and the sound of dress shoes clacking on a clear surface became audible.

She tensed uncomfortably when the presences neared, ears pricked.

“…Did you hear that?” A man’s voice, a deep baritone, wondered.

“Pardon?” the second voice, a crisp, professional tone, uttered.

“I thought I heard a—never mind. Let’s just greet our guest. Wands ready.” The door clicked open and a shadow loomed over Chelsea, blocking off the light. “Good da—arrgh!”

Whoever had been unprepared to see her had just received a nasty shock, like the sting of an electric eel in water.

“It’s … a _baby_ ,” spluttered the first voice, like he’d never dreamed of seeing one before in his entire life.

“Bloody hell,” the second voice swore.

As if to drive the point—that Chelsea was the baby they were gawping—home, one of them came over and touched her cheek. She squirmed away and batted helplessly at it, gurgling her protests: _I’m not a baby_ and _don’t touch me!_

Chelsea let loose a short scream when she was lifted off the ground and fitted effortlessly into arms, skull in the crook of an elbow, feet not even touching the other arm. Eyelids flying open, seeing a smear of colours, with no outlines of a proper shape.

_They just picked me up as easily as if I am a … a…_

She drew in a shuddering breath, fortifying herself for an impossible reality.

_…A baby. I am a baby._

“Maybe it’s just Transfigured and is actually a bomb.”

“Don’t be an idiot, Marks.”

“I was kidding. Jeez. Oh… hey, there’s a visitor’s badge.”

Chelsea was still very far from the ground, tucked in the arms of a person she did not know. Something was plucked off her blanket-covered chest and examined. “It’s ineligible nonsense. _I, ah, er_.”

“What do we do, Digby?”

“We staff a report, of _course_.”

“D’you think we should cast a Heating Charm on—“ The blankets were pried apart, and Chelsea whined in embarrassment as she realised what they were doing: checking her gender, “—on her? She’s practically blue.”

“That’s one of your finer ideas, Marks.”

There was a tingling sensation as warmth spread from her cheek to her toes. Chelsea hadn’t realised how cold she’d been until the flood of unnaturally induced warmth chased away the chill gripping her bones. She subconsciously nestled closer to the source of body heat pressing up against her entire right side like a furnace.

She was asleep before she even realised how heavy her eyes were.

-x-

_Ugh…_

Awareness came to her in an itchy stretch from the back of her throat. She grunted in acknowledgement of her body’s thirst for water but did not move to quench it. Her internal clock told her it was an ungodly hour to be dead—much less to be _awake_ —

Her rhythmic breathing stuttered.

Breathing. _Breaths_. She was alive, not as dead as she had dreamed she was, with the headstone and its absurd legend: HERE LIES CHELSEA CARTER. ONE ALMOND BUTTER SANDWICH TOO MANY.

Her eyes flew open.

The room was darkish, lit by a soft amber glow from an undetermined source but not brightly lit enough for Chelsea to easily suss out where she was. She wasn’t anywhere remotely familiar.

She tried to sit up and look around but failed epically. Drawing a breath that went down an anxiety-clogged airway, she tried to roll over to push herself up but found her body too heavy, her muscles too weak. Incredulity choked her: she was parkour extraordinaire, how could she fail to roll—

She remembered.

The stench of what she could now ascribe to be a skip. The rough touch on her cheek. The sensation of falling, and falling… The taste of almond butter … so that’s what almond tasted like…

Her hands, her _hands_ —small and pudgy, unscarred—winked blurrily at her as she opened and closed her new digits.

_Where am I?_

For the first time, she registered that she was very warm and comfortable; a sharp contrast to the previous chilly conditions she had been dumped in. She could feel the softness of fabric against tender newborn skin, and she could feel a light covering atop her body. Grateful as she was for the improved conditions, she was aghast by the lack of function this body had.

She made a noise of discontent and it drew someone to her. She was plucked up like she was weighed as much as a tiny pebble—which disoriented her—and tucked into the crook of an elbow, and then something pressed against her lips. Her jaw dropping in utter bewilderment allowed the offending item into her mouth; it took Chelsea a moment to realise, after she’d swallowed a few gulps, that she was drinking milk from a bottle. Like an infant. Chelsea’s five foot eight body couldn’t have fitted neatly in one arm, which just drove reality further home for her.

“Poor thing,” the woman cooed, “Abandoned the same hour you were born. You must be so upset.”

Chelsea was _bald_ , drinking from a baby bottle, and horrendously small—she had other things to worry about than being abandoned. The latter she was used to; the former part… not so.

“I bet the father’s Muggle-born,” said another voice, another woman with a nastier tone, “A witch found herself pregnant with a Mudblood’s whelp, got scared and ditched it so that she wouldn’t have to put up with the proof of her guilt. At least, the woman had enough sense to leave the baby where the Ministry for Magic would definitely find it, and not say someplace in Knockturn Alley though I wouldn’t blame her.”

 _Mudblood? Knockturn Alley? Isn’t this_ nightmare _over with yet?_

“Don’t use that vile word in here—“

“With You Know Who and his Death Eaters running around killing anyone remotely associated with Muggle-borns, I wouldn’t be surprised,” A third voice interjected, “I heard from Healer Lee that a Muggle-born witch was refused entry into St Mungo’s for treatment the other day. The Director pitched a fit because it gave us bad publicity—“

“Quiet,” hissed the first woman, the one holding an attentive Chelsea, “Take your worthless gossiping outside.” Grumbles arose, then the unmistakable sounds of footsteps clicking out of the ward.

Chelsea was familiar with those terms, even though she didn’t read much and wasn’t much good at reading, the latter the cause for the former; dyslexia ran in the family for generations. The only one who tried hard with her was her second grade maths teacher, Mrs Denny. Somehow, among thirty-odd kids, she’d noticed Chelsea and realised her student didn’t understand the question and not that she hadn’t grasped the mathematical concept so Mrs Denny would make her stay back after school and read all these crazy stories aloud. Hoping one would snag her interest enough for her to actively pursue reading, to find out what happened next, no matter how hard.

She went for the big guns from the start, the hit series.

Magic. Wizards. Prophecies. Wands. Secret alleys. Wizarding schools.

 _They’re not real_ , said Chelsea huffily. She was pouting at the locked door of the classroom—Mrs Denny had learned that if the door was not locked, Chelsea would zip out the place faster than wind. The words in the yellowy pages were too small and they hurt her eyes. She’d rather watch TV or listen to audiobook versions.

_That’s why it’s a story, isn’t it? Would you read the first sentence to me?_

_No!_

_Then I’d read to you._

_NO!_ And she flung herself down on the classroom floor, hands clasped to her ears. Unfortunately, Mrs Denny’s voice was as loud as two lions’ roars. You could’ve heard her down the street.

Chelsea heard every word of the first chapter in the story of the Boy Who Lived. Went on to hear a lot more, read some, watched more. Knew enough to suss out where she was the moment the names cropped up—Knockturn Alley, Muggle-born, _witches_.

_Can’t be, it can’t be…_

This nightmare was beginning to spin into the realms of fantasy. Chelsea squirmed and coughed a little when the last drop of milk hit her tongue and the woman removed the bottle. She was rocked and, to her mortification, she felt comforted. Drowsiness washed over her like a thick fuzzy blanket draped over her. The woman seemed to sense this, and she gently placed Chelsea back into the crib.

“Sleep tight now, baby,” she whispered soothingly. “I’ll be here when you wake.”

Somewhere nearby, another baby wailed, strangely muffled but audible all the same.

“I’ll handle that one, Healer Chung.”

Chelsea was in an infant’s ward.

Reincarnation—alright, that stretched the limits of her scepticism to its breaking point, but the terminologies she’d just heard? Was she supposed to believe she’d reborn into a fictional reality—the universe of Harry Potter and co. to top it off—just because she mistakenly ate almond butter?

Chelsea started laughing at the absurdity of _everything_ , but babies couldn’t really laugh so early in life, so all that came out was a series of choked gurgling that sent the woman who’d been _bottle-feeding_ her earlier into alarm, fearing she’d choked or had reflux or other typical baby disorders.

She only laughed harder.

-x-

Crying.

It sucked, made her throat scratchy and her face sticky. Chelsea wondered how the other babies around her cried so effortlessly, so long, and so much all the damn time.

Somehow she had failed to fully appreciate the gift of words and articulation until now, when she had to howl loudly to make her physical needs known. If she was hallucinating about being reborn into the Harry Potter franchise, her mind must be subconsciously masochistic, to need someone to strip her and bathe her when she soiled herself because Cleaning Charms apparently weren’t good for newborn skin—the humiliation _smarted_. At least the frequent diaper changes had been avoided; even the most tactile of Healers wanted to avoid a direct attack from an atomic bomb on their senses when they could help it.

But if the humiliation didn’t finish her off, boredom would do the job one of these days.

Chelsea tried to sleep a lot to minimise the time spent awake and alone. Well, she technically wasn’t alone. She was acutely aware of Healers coming and out, tending to the sojourning babies or handing them back to their ecstatic parents, and there were other newborn babies there whose parents invariably came to peer at through a looking glass. Chelsea wasn’t a popular baby: no one knocked on the glass to get her attention and she was mostly left alone. If the Healer on duty felt particularly sympathetic, like Healer Chung, they’d cuddle her and kiss her fuzzy scalp—she didn’t appreciate it as time passed, so most caretaking tasks were done with the impersonality of magic. A bottle of milk held aloft magically as she fed from it, blankets magically tightening round her when she felt cold and to unwrap if she felt hot that time of day.

Magic was … real.

In the days—maybe even weeks—she’d spent here, body developing at a snail’s average speed, she’d come to at least embrace the current reality, even if she did not necessarily like her current predicament. She wished the Healers would use more magic, beside the charm to magically change diapers and sheets. But then again, she supposed it was abusive _and_ downright hazardous if Healers cast flashy spells like Stupefy and Bombarda in the vicinity of the infant ward, much less on the babies.

At this point though, Chelsea would’ve enthusiastically punched the air with her fist, Hermione-style, to volunteer as target practice— _me, oh, please pick me_ —because she was _that_ bored. Aside from making herself heard when she needed something, and cursing her friend for her hand in her death, Chelsea had nothing to do. She couldn’t see properly and her source of entertainment—and news—came from the inevitable gossiping between two Healers switching shifts.

She learned from listening in on them that she had been abandoned in a telephone booth—which served as the visitor’s entrance to the headquarters of the Ministry for Magic, and it made sense since she heard what sounded like a phone dial turning—the same hour of her birth and her umbilical cord still attached and her mother’s fluids drying on her skin. She had been brought to St Mungo’s by some Ministry workers who were both male with masculine names.

The only reason she knew their names were because the Healers were saying how it would’ve been convenient to just name her after one of them—too bad she was a girl, and they were men with names like Masayoshi Digby and Arsene Marks. The Director of St Mungo’s was going to dip into the hospital donation funds to hire a Naming Seer. Chelsea supposed she ought to feel honoured; from the sound of it, Naming Seers weren’t cheap.

Chelsea wasn’t bothered by this naming business as she already had her own name but she did get irritated when every Healer who came by made sad noncommittal sounds and said not very sincerely, “Poor thing,” and cast aspersions on her origins, blood status and non-existent ancestors.

Their most popular theory so far was that she was the bastard offspring of a Muggle-born wizard and a pure- or half-blood witch. Fearing prosecution from the Death Eaters and the shame it brought to her family, her mother had cast her away. Way to make Chelsea feel better about her situation. They had no idea they were scratching at a wound that had long since scabbed into a scar, but which still itched.

Most days, if it wasn’t about her, it was about gruesome deaths and mutilation, mostly victims of the Death Eaters the Healers couldn’t save and who have died in St Mungo’s. Unless she was the punch-line to a universal joke—which involved faking British accents and making up many horrible ways one can die creatively in a magical way—some of which made Chelsea’s insides squirm—it was real.

“Did you hear about the Deatons? Terrible business, it was.”

“I heard. Greyback and his pack’s doing, innit? Their little girl died last night downstairs and the Aurors haven’t found their boy yet, must’ve been turned—”

“The Aurors say Greyback’s possibly working for … _You Know Who_.” _Gasp!_

Or sometimes:

“What I don’t get is why Professor Dumbledore isn’t bringing the fight to You Know Who: take him down once and for all. He did it with that Grindelwald bloke, isn’t he?”

“Well … Professor Dumbledore is getting on in age. Maybe he can’t do it anymore. That fight with Grindelwald was many decades ago now…”

“If Professor Dumbledore can’t do it, then—then _who can_?”

“Maybe one of them wizards in that Order groupie of his…”

Chelsea hinged on this valuable piece of information to hazard a guess of the timeline. She must’ve been born sometime before Harry Potter if no mention of him was made. There was no “The Boy Who Lived will save us all!” and “He is the Chosen One!” etc. so it didn’t take a genius to shrink the possibilities of the timescale.

But—

How many days had she been staving off boredom with theories in her head and listening in on gossips?

How many days more could she endure doing the same?

Left alone to her devices, Chelsea spent much of her time pondering. And a bit of the rest of the time she had to sniffling into her fist, mourning the things she lost.

Her friends, even if one of them never took her allergy seriously enough to avoid this tragedy. Her future, even if it had only been as bright as spare change in a gutter when it was cut short. Her aunt Kit, even though they had only just started living together; her mother’s youngest sister, only fourteen years older to Chelsea’s sixteen, was the one who finally put an end to the series of foster homes she’d blown through. The what-ifs of an entire life made her ill with want and sick with the injustice of having to die when she finally could’ve gotten what she wanted: a family, some permanency.

Even now, after death, she was still hanging out in limbo. Her prospects murkier than drain water. The people around her as transient as the seasons, changing after a set amount of time.

It was one such day of hopeless boredom and angst when a Healer uncharacteristically came to pick up Chelsea and walked her some distance away from the familiarity of her crib. She squirmed and shoved a fist in the woman’s chin to express her displeasure.

She tried to see where they were going but gave it up as a lost cause because her vision sucked.

She heard two people talking as they emerged from the tranquillity of the neonatal room. They stopped when Chelsea was carted nearer to them. Her skin tautened when she sensed the attention sharpening on her.

“Is that the child to be named then?” drawled a deep, scratchy voice. A woman’s voice, but rough as bark. A rustle of fabric, then—a shadow came to block out the glare of the ceiling lights. Chelsea realised at the same moment: she was the Naming Seer the hospital director had called.

“Yes, Ms Oona.”

Since being reborn in this universe, Chelsea had heard enough weird-ass names to last her entire lifetime. Oona—what the hell were her parents thinking? Chelsea hoped the witch wasn’t about to give her something just as horrendous as a form of twisted revenge.

“Do you need to hold her?” asked the Healer, already holding Chelsea out.

“There’s no need,” said Ms Oona, the Naming Seer, touching Chelsea’s hand. At least, Chelsea guessed it was her hand; the Healer had both hands full with the rest of her after all. The texture of the Naming Seer’s palm was rough, almost like Chelsea’s own back when she still had her own body.

Chelsea’s palms had been thick with old burn scars, reddish and bumpy with physical mementos from forgotten toddler years. The only explanation she ever got was from her fourth social worker and it was based off a neighbour’s hedged guesses: Chelsea was a hysterical kid with a penchant for screaming over every silly thing, wasting tears and tantrums, so her mother held her hands to the sizzling stove and showed her what was truly worth crying over. It was the part and parcel of a mother’s thankless job: imparting life lessons that sticks with you forever, and giving kids weird-ass names. Someone had obviously neglected to tell Chelsea’s second mother, the mysterious woman who gave birth to her in this incarnation, this and now someone else had to pick up the slack.

Chelsea wondered why Oona’s hand was so rough.

Fingers traced the diminutive lines on Chelsea’s hand. Palmistry? Please. Of all types of magical phenomena, in Harry Potter universe or out, divination was the sketchiest, the one Chelsea doubted most of all. How was Oona going to bullshit a name out of her hand?

“I read about her in the Daily Prophet a few days ago,” said Oona conversationally, “Her parents haven’t been located yet?”

“Doesn’t seem so,” said the Healer disinterestedly. “Can you See who her parents are?” Chelsea perked up, curious to know if the Healers’ increasingly wild speculations had hit bulls-eye.

“My Inner Eye glimpses the future, not the past, but I have a strong intuition that her parents are no longer in our realm.” And Chelsea’s interest burned into ashes and scattered to the winds. Oona was starting to sound like what Chelsea remembered of Trelawney—a fake who relied on the obscurity of death to be impressive and mystique. “All I see in her future is a ghastly creature, four-legged and with fur darker than the night itself.”

Chelsea made a small noise she hoped came across as derisive and rolled her eyes. She batted at the Healer’s collarbone, like, _Can you believe this chick?_

Turns out, yes, the Healer could. She gasped dramatically and seemed to recoil from the baby in her grip. “You mean … _the Grim_?” She exclaimed dramatically.

“Possibly. I see this same creature running through a forest under a starry sky darker than the usual night, sniffing … it’s on the hunt for something … a hunting dog…” Chelsea yawned and curled a little into the Healer to snore the day away. “She will be instrumental in a hunt, for what I cannot precisely see, but this, I know for certain: she will share her name with the southern dog of the pair that hunts across the night: _Chara_.”

That … wasn’t half as bad as it could be. Chelsea wasn’t sure about sharing a name with a mutt, star or not, but it was better than something that sounded like Oona’s own name which _oozed_ with weirdness.

“As for her surname—name her after where she was found.”

“The Ministry?”

“The booth,” said Oona in a tone that implied, “You dolt,” at the end. “Let that man remember for always what he had done.”

“That man?” repeated the Healer, properly flustered.

“That is all I have to say.” There was a strong movement of wind as Oona brushed past them and exited with a dramatic swish of her robes—Chelsea couldn’t see, of course, but she could imagine it judging by the sounds she heard. In the past few weeks, her hearing seemed to have sharpened although it could have only been her own impression after being blind as a bat for as long.

“Well,” Chelsea was readjusted in the Healer’s arms, “I suppose, at the end of the day, it’s up to you to make Chara Booth a winner, eh, baby?”

Chelsea supposed there were names worse than _Chara Booth_.


	2. Two

Chel— _Chara_ spent a total of two months in the tender, loving care of the Healers of St Mungo’s before she was finally kicked out. She supposed the Ministry for Magic had been covering the cost for her stay but the director wasn’t happy about a perfectly healthy baby—that was something at least—staying around where she _might_ get infected with illnesses.

She had no idea where she would be going.

The Ministry for Magic hadn’t been able to locate a single blood relative, partly for the lack of trying: abandoned baby ranked lowly against Death Eaters amok in this and that area of the country, and partly because it was understandably difficult to find a relative of a baby left in a telephone booth (a magical one, but still) without any sort of identification or even trinket; the blanket she was wrapped in turned out to be nothing but a Transfigured tablecloth—with ketchup stains to boot. Chara couldn’t imagine why the Ministry for Magic took so long to call off the search. It sounded perfectly clear to Chara what kind of message the person who dumped her wanted to send: _It’s your problem now._

“So who’s she going to?”

 _Thank you, Healer Lou, for asking on my behalf._ The baby named Chara Booth thought as she squinted in the vague hope she’d be able to see—ten inches ahead, ten years down the line, the future, _something_.

“A lady stepped up to claim the child, claiming to be a distant relative.” Despite the joyous nature of this news, the witch’s voice was taut with disapproval.

“What’s wrong, Chung?”

“It’s just—she’s a _Squib_! I can’t believe the Ministry would allow that! It’s practically abuse, what if her—her lack of magic rubs off on the baby?”

_That would be terrible!_

“That would be terrible,” Healer Lou admitted. Chara imagined the shrug of his shoulders. “But what can you do?”

And that was how Chara left the ivory holding cell for a den of meowing monsters. She sneezed for the umpteenth time and batted away the scratchy tongue of a feline. The furry creatures had been scrambling up the crib to snuggle against her, like was a bloody heater. Nothing short of an outraged wail could scare them away. She wished she could get her new caregiver to close the door but knowing the beasts, they’d find a way in, being descended from Kneazles, a breed of magical and highly intelligent felines, and all.

Her caregiver was _Arabella Figg_. Chara only knew she was a Squib and she worked for Dumbledore. And she was apparently a relative. Given Arabella’s penchant for lying when it aligned with Dumbledore’s goals, Chara could only surmise that either they were bona fide relatives or Chara had something to do with Dumbledore’s goals; both seemed impossible.

What a disappointing coincidence, and more than a little worrisome, to have Arabella Figg as her new caretaker. Arabella was a Squib so she could hardly use magic to entertain Chara and now the reincarnate would have to put up with even _more_ physical contact. Plus, if Death Eaters attacked the place thanks to Arabella’s allegiance, the Squib was virtually useless.

Boring and unsafe _and_ crawling with felines, a breed Chara was not fond of as a whole. She honestly preferred aquatic creatures. She’d never been allowed a pet before in foster homes though, and even when the family had a goldfish or koi, they died, quickly.

Speaking of foster homes, it was depressing to be here. She’d been mentally fortifying herself for this, from the moment she learned she had been ditched by her parents and her non-existent relatives. She thought she’d escaped this type of living arrangement since Aunt Kit had took her in two months ago—well, two months before her life as Chelsea Carter ended that was—and to be thrown right back into it made her gut churn with frustration and disappointment.

Something swatted at her leg. She squinted down the short length of her body to see a snowy blur curiously pawing at her left foot. Its body nimbly leapt into the crib. Chara aimed a kick at its face and rolled over onto her side with a satisfied harrumph when it yowled and retreated.

The weight of her emotions settled like boulders on her chest.

It was difficult to breathe.

-x-

Chara didn’t try to interact with Arabella Figg—she still couldn’t talk, what was there to do?—beyond the necessary wail to summon her and the lady herself didn’t seem keen on touching or hanging around her beyond necessary. Her vision had improved dramatically in the past few months since moving here, enough for her to tell that Arabella was a diminutive lady in her forties with short, flyaway hair under the hairnet, and a sallow complexion that indicated she subscribed to the belief excess time under the sun led to an early demise. She also wore hideous paisley wraparounds that made Chara wish she was still seeing things in blur.

Chara had the faint impression Arabella was not overly thrilled with her existence. Arabella spent more time with her cats at any rate. She spoke mainly to them; Arabella had an open-door policy, her voice tended to carry to Chara’s room. She could hear Arabella grumbling about the stinking diapers she had to change and how she must’ve been Confunded by Dumbledore to take on the odious task of caring for a baby.

“And what sort of name is Chara? Is it Char- like in Charlie or Char- as in Kara?” Arabella asked her cats. “Her mother should’ve the decency to give her a sensible name before turning her out to the streets.”

So, turning your own child to the streets was fine so as long as you’d remembered to give them a name? Chara thought irritably. Luckily, Arabella didn’t have anything else to say on that matter.

She did, however, complained about how some of the Order of the Phoenix members looked at her funny during meetings. This came as a surprise to Chara—not about the looks Arabella got since it was probably a combination of her fashion sense, Squib status and minimal contribution to the cause—because she wasn’t even aware Arabella had left the house. What Arabella believed to be adequacy—leaving Chara to the care of cats smarter than some percentile of the human population—merely indicated psychosis in other people’s minds.

“And there’s something off about that witch baby,” Arabella sighed to an audience of Mr Paws, Snowy, Tufty and Mr Tibbles and a couple of yet unnamed kittens that would be sold off to pet shops. “She doesn’t cry, doesn’t smile, doesn’t make a single noise. Not like next door’s Mr and Mrs Dawn’s baby—now that’s a pleasant, cheerful child. Do you think it warrants a visit to St Mungo’s?”

Her feline consultants offered a series of meows. “I suppose you’re right; there’s nothing to worry about. I should worry more about what we’re supposed to pack.”

How does Arabella _talk_ to the cats? _I thought she was a Squib_ , Chara thought, baffled.

Was Arabella imagining their conversation? Was this a slow, prolonged psychotic breakdown on her part?

And Chara was still too weak to really run and hide in case of dangers. She could sit up without aid, crawl the length of the room and even stand on wobbly legs, but running seemed as possible as hiking Mt Everest in a swimming suit.

Right, time to practice.

With mobility, some of her boredom chafed. She spent half her time squinting at the mobile hovering her head, trying to shatter it or turn it purple or make it float just to prove she had magic. So far, nothing had happened to prove she was anything but a strange baby who glared a lot at something. She split the other half of her time sleeping and exercising her muscles.

Chelsea had been quite athletic, since one of her foster father had introduced her to parkour (he was an instructor). She didn’t remain in contact with him—she usually didn’t as a general rule—but she had persisted because she enjoyed the fast-paced strain of it and the high she got off her competitive streaks when she beat records.

Chara wondered how long it would take to get back to that level. Running away very quickly and without losing your breath in a few minutes was undoubtedly a useful skill to have in this universe buzzing with Death Eaters.

Chara looped an arm over the railing of her crib and, with a bit of struggling, swung her left leg over it. Her arms bunched with strain to keep her attached to the railing when she went to repeat the process with her remaining leg. The first time Chara tried to escape the crib this way to explore, Arabella had walked in: the Squib screeched like a dying hyena and grabbed the reincarnate before she could free-fall to the ground, inciting a scream of frustration from the baby, which set off a lot of agitated meowing from the other residents of the house.

“Oof!”

Chara landed with a small thump. Pain bloomed from her side to her butt. She waited, breathless, on the carpeted floor to see if Arabella would walk in and freak. She righted herself, a bit achy, and made a bee-line for the door.

Things had gotten rowdy outside in the long ten minutes it took for her to get from up there to down here. She poked her head out into the hallway, hearing the clear blare of a honk. She crawled down the hall that branched off to a closed toilet, Arabella’s room, and the living room. She paused halfway down, noticing belatedly that the faded yellow wallpaper looked blank—photo frames of Arabella’s favourite cats as kittens or those that had passed away or been sold had littered the space just yesterday evening.

Why’d she take it down?

Chara continued to the living room where her eyes widened upon seeing the men milling in and out of the space. They were picking up boxes and hauling them out of the house. Had Arabella just been rendered homeless because she couldn’t pay the mortgage?

One of the men—a Muggle, most likely—bent down low for the last box in the stack and inadvertently made eye contact with Chara.

“You’ve a kid, Mrs Figg?” he blurted out, like he was familiar with Arabella.

“What? No, no—that’s—uh, my first cousin’s son’s daughter. I’m just babysitting.”

Arabella had told the St Mungo’s Healers that Chara was her grandniece—or as she put it, _my brother’s daughter’s daughter_. (Blatant lies, all of them.)

Shrugging, the man left. He came back not a moment too soon—Arabella had been giving Chara the stink-eye for escaping her crib—and handed Arabella a cheque. “That’ll be the last of it. We’ll have them delivered down to Godric’s Hollow by tomorrow, ma’am. Pleasure doing business with you.”

Godric’s Hollow?

 _We’re moving to Godric’s Hollow?_ Chara could’ve gushed but what came out was an incoherent string of gurgles. _Why’re we suddenly moving there?_

Chara could answer her own question a moment later: Arabella stalked over to her and plucked her off the ground, grumbling about precocious witch babies, and Chara was suddenly eye-level to the calendar tacked to the wall. 17 June 1980. Arabella had circled the date with a bold red marker, indicating its importance—possibly because the moving company had come today.

17 June. Harry Potter was born on 31 July in Godric’s Hollow. And Arabella was moving there soon. Chara suddenly remembered that Arabella’s job had been to be a stalker. Always observing and protecting Harry Potter in the only she could: report to Dumbledore the moment something was wrong.

Of course!

It hit her like a lightning bolt: Hagrid had flown to Godric’s Hollow right after the attack. There had been no mention of whom or how Dumbledore had found out that the Potters had been attacked, but something—or someone—must’ve rang the alarm.

 _Arabella_ was the one who alerted Dumbledore of Voldemort’s attack.

And she’d moved to Little Whinging thereafter, continuing her duty while the Order of the Phoenix disbanded.

Chara’s regard for Arabella Figg suddenly went up a notch.

-x-

The next day, they set off in a rented van.

Considering the last time Chara had been in a vehicle, she’d died, she felt uneasy even though she never used to bother with seat belts and driving safety norms (i.e. don’t text while driving).

Getting pulled over by Muggle police officers would be the least of their concerns if Arabella didn’t drive safely. Chara wasn’t even tall enough to look over the dashboard—she wouldn’t see an oncoming crash. She glanced up the window, seeing treelines, lampposts and the fluffy clouds obscuring a mostly grey sky. She grew tired of counting the number of lampposts as time passed and her boredom doubled. It beckoned sleep with a cajoling hand when nothing of interest happened past the first hour.

Arabella didn’t have toys for Chara to play with, beside a basic stuffed bear she ignored. It sat in a sad brown lump near the gear. Chara examined it with a blurry eye as she yawned.

Arabella’s eyes darted a quick glance at her as she floored the accelerator, swivelling out of her lane and overtaking a slower vehicle—a lorry. Chara’s head swayed sideways.

When they finally reached there, Chara was exhausted. She’d fallen asleep sitting and that cut short three mind-numbing hours but she had still spent another two and a half waiting and glowering crankily at the plain sky, getting brighter as they left a county behind.

Godric’s Hollow was a sleepy, quaint town. The type of dead-end place you come back to when you were in your retirement years. That the Dark Lord was in his fifties, a couple more years to his autumn days, when he came here was ironic in hindsight and thinking about it improved her mood significantly—the Dark Lord technically _did_ end up retiring here. He came back from retirement years later, but still … Chara snickered into her palms.

Arabella’s van rolled to a sputtering halt in a row of cottages that faced a line of trees—the mouth of the forest surrounding Godric’s Hollow.

“This van is an eyesore,” Arabella sighed.

Chara made a noise of agreement, something that sounded like, “Ah-gah.” There was a modest, tin-can of a car parked in front of the cottage with a blue roof, but Arabella’s van was way larger than that. And it was blindingly white.

“I’ll find another parking spot,” she decided, “once the lot of you’ve been settled.”

Chara squealed, which was the only way she could express enthusiastic agreement. She wasn’t suffering from motion-sickness as much as she was tired of being cooped up in one place for so long. It took some tedious fifteen minutes as Arabella tried to find the right keys for the gate, then the door, and went to free the cats first before helping Chara alight. As she was carried inside, Chara saw, emblazoned boldly on the side of the otherwise plain van, a golden phoenix. The movers hadn’t been there yet, so the house was empty and spacious.

The front door, unsurprisingly, had a cat-flap; Arabella probably searched specifically for a place with a door like this.

Chara explored the place and found to her pleasure there were stairs, pleasantly carpeted in teal. She immediately tried to climb up them but Snowy, the meddlesome snow-white three-quarter Kneazle, leapt in front of her and slashed at the air in front of Chara—a clear ward-off. She hissed at it and received another air slash for her efforts at defiance. She tried to swat it but it puffed up its fur in warning.

Before Chara could rear back and tackle it—she wasn’t about to let herself be bullied by a cat—the doorbell rang.

Everyone tensed—especially the cats. Snowy let out a yowl that could’ve scared off demons. Chara slid back down to the ground and crawled to the cat-flap, where Tufty had exited. Mr Paws stood guard over the pregnant cat, and Mr Tibbles hissed threateningly at the cat-flap. She drew level with it, then lunged forward before it tried to impede her like Snowy did.

Her head made it through pretty easy, then she balanced herself on both palms. The flap dragged over her head and back. She distantly heard Snowy’s screech, undermined by the exclamation of surprise from their visitor.

She tried to drag her legs out after her but they got stuck. “Ungh,” she muttered, straining on her palms. She huffed and looked up at the man. He was tall, impressively so, with—oh… oh! Chara’s eyes widened significantly at the sight of the messy hair, spiking in defiance of gravity. His eyes flashed hazelnut-brown eyes behind a pair of round glasses.

His smile was confused, but wide and friendly, open.

“Uh, hey… so you’re the watchdog Dumbledore’s sent?” He crouched down to level the field but her neck was starting to ache with how much she had to crane them. “You’re a lot smaller than I thought.” He reached down and tugged her free from the cat-flap. His eyes softened the longer he looked at her.

Chara squinted at him. Maybe he was kooky from cabin fever.

“Want one?” Chara belatedly noticed he had been holding a basket. He placed it beside Chara, brushed the cloth covering its contents aside, releasing a hazy aroma of baked goodies. Her mouth watered. She could eat solids already, but the toasted bread Arabella gave her smelled nothing like this. She reached out to grab the first biscuit she saw when she heard a startled squeak. Both she and the man looked round to the gate, where Tufty had led an anxious Arabella back.

“Mrs Figg, is it?” The wizard stood to his full height. Chara swiped the biscuit and stuffed it in her mouth. Her gums did most of the munching. “Hi, I’m James Potter. But I think you already know that. We saw that van so Lily sent me to greet our—“

“What are you doing outside the protection of your home?” Arabella squawked, dark eyes wide and darting. She scanned him up and down quickly, and grimaced. “And without your wand? Are your brains addled, boy?”

“I’ll look conspicuous if I walk around town with my wand,” said James, nonplussed by her paranoia.

 _It’s that kind of attitude that’s gonna leave you ripe for picking for the Dark Lord_ , thought Chara with a wince.

“Dumbledore said you’re not supposed to leave your house,” Arabella sounded nervous, wringing her fingers. Chara didn’t think the Squib had even noticed her sitting by the door. She did notice, however, the flash of displeasure that crossed James’s face.

“I know what he said. I was just trying to be … _welcoming_.” His expression lightly toed the line to petulance.

“Well, thank you,” Arabella said quite sincerely. She stopped fiddling with her fingers so much. “But the movers aren’t here yet. I’ve no place to entertain guests. I don’t even have a bag of tea.”

James brushed it off. “It’s okay, we just wanted you to know we appreciate your help. But to think we can’t even go out to buy groceries ourselves anymore…” His shoulders slumped, but he tried to hide his despair at being cooped up in his home for as long as the war raged with a smile. His gaze alighted on Chara again. He wiggled his fingers in goodbye as he started down the path leading outside the gate. “You know, if we can’t leave, she—what’s her name again?”

“Chara,” replied Arabella after a short pause. She pronounced the name like _Char_ lie.

“Chara can come over,” James continued, “I mean, after the baby’s born and he’s slightly older. He’ll love a play-mate.”

Chara froze.

Arabella ushered James out the rest of the way. “All right, all right, just—hurry home, Mr Potter! Lock your doors, shut your curtains, enforce your wards! And absolutely _do not_ leave.”

“Yeah, yeah.” James rolled his eyes with a kind of well-practiced insolence—his parents and professors must’ve seen it a thousand times.

He traipsed into the forest: halfway past the treeline, he turned round with a final wave, and vanished on the spot.

-x-

James kept his word to stay at home like a good boy.

Chara supposed they were going to have a home birth and he was sticking to his wife’s side like a leech, in case she was ready to burst at any minute. The calendar counted down to 31 July. Chara didn’t hold her breath waiting since she knew disaster wouldn’t be striking in another year. Her job was to be a spectator—technically, it was Arabella’s job but Chara was going to be hanging around and watching anyway.

She didn’t see James after the first meeting though she knew Arabella bought necessities for them and sent them to his house. Arabella probably got to see him when he answered the door to pick up the stuff she’d bought for the expecting couple. Chara hadn’t been allowed to tag along, and probably wouldn’t be allowed until she could walk. Arabella bought her groceries in bulk, meaning she couldn’t push a stroller and balance numerous shopping bags at the same time. She still left Chara alone at home—well, with the cats, but like any normal people, she discounted them as babysitters.

Arabella had been nicer about bringing Chara out of the house though. Previously they’d lived in a bustling townhouse—Chara heard car honks throughout the day—and she supposed that was part of the reason why Arabella never brought Chara out: too many people. Now that they were rusticating, the cats had a lot of space to roam, and without them in the house, Arabella got bored—hence the outings.

She’d purchased a stroller to transport Chara around. Chara hated it, because it was humiliating, and people tended to coo and smile at her with sappy expressions and try to touch her. Sadly, Chara’s glower was about as intimidating a wad of cotton. But the alternative was being carried by Arabella and Chara hated that even more.

She disliked being touched, especially when the person touching her was female. She used to think it was primal instinct: her body remembering old dangers, from the days a woman’s touch meant burns, scratches and pinches—pain.

She reacted the same way to booze too, probably because her mother had been an alcoholic and was drunk most of the time. Chara never touched alcohol, not even to taste test when her classmates considered it a staple at parties they hosted—she had seen how it had ruined her mother’s life, giving birth at sixteen to Chelsea after a drunken one nightstand, and finally took it away when she stumbled into the path of a speeding car after a wild binge.

Luckily for Chara’s second life expectancy, Arabella was not a drunkard and Godric’s Hollow had very few cars, probably owned by the select few commuters living here. The town planner had structured the residential blocks so that each were equidistant from the town centre where the shops were, and most residents need only ten minutes to walk to the Main Street; they were also cyclists zipping around, and the rare motorcycles.

Chara counted two of the motorcycles as Arabella pushed her along before she realised she was staring at the same landmarks and the sleek bike was, in fact, one and the same, parked in a dark, narrow alley between two blocks of terraced houses. Why was Arabella specifically circling this block? She squinted to get a better look, a bit befuddled even though she was starting to grasp Arabella was patrolling the area for strange occurrences.

 _But I thought the Potters lived in a cottage_.

A loud meow rerouted her attention. She saw a streak of grey and black, the colour of Tufty’s coat, darting to the back of the stroller. A series of meows later, Arabella could be heard muttering worriedly, “They have a visitor? Is he on the approved visitors list?” They even had a _list_? James and Lily were starting to seem like prisoners. It sort of explained James’s well-suppressed mutinous expression the last time she saw him. “Ah, he’s a good friend? All right then. Carry on, Tufty. And tell Snowy that she isn’t retiring to be the Potters’ permanent housecat; she’s still on duty. Dumbledore’s counting on us.”

 _I still don’t know how she communicates with those damn cats. And I hope Snowy does retire. I hate her._ Snowy was the most irritating of the cats Arabella kept at home, obstructing Chara everywhere she went and glowering insolently at her whenever their eyes met.

Tufty meowed and released a low purr when Arabella presumably crouched down to scratch the underside of its maw. Chara watched as it slunk back to where it came from. She leaned out of her side and only now that she was expecting something in that direction, a large, terracotta brown cottage materialised, nestled snugly in a copse of tall, spindly trees. Vines grew on the side visible to Chara’s vision. Morning glories in full broom curled artistically round the black gates that would’ve opened to a narrow, flagstone path to the Potters’ front door.

She saw Tufty leaping nimbly onto the red-bricked walls bordering the Potter’s cottage, and disappeared with another jump down into the property.

Chara looked up when she noticed her shade retracting: Arabella had pulled up the canopy to peer down at Chara. “I suppose you can see the cottage just fine.”

She pointed at the cottage.

“Ya,” Chara said.


	3. Three

There were three men marching up to the Potters’ cage—er, cottage.

Chara stared after them.

Arabella had established a morning routine for the past few weeks. After breakfast, she’d wheel the baby on a stroller into the town, wander a bit past the shops and then invariably veer toward this secluded area. There was a bench with chipping blue paint, and Arabella sat there, observing the non-existent activity around the Potters’ living area under the pretence of reading storybooks to Chara.

Arabella was reading crap like _Cinderella_ and _Princess and the Pea_ to Chara, much to the reincarnated baby’s irritation. She supposed it was part of the cover: Death Eaters and whatnot wouldn’t look twice at a grandma reading Muggle books to her grandchild (even though Chara was as much her grandchild as she was the nephew of a Hippogriff). On another note, she had Chara parked facing in the general direction of the cottage, which was why she noticed the men—wizards—first.

Chara could hazard a pretty accurate guess as to who they were. The tallest and thinnest had too-fair hair and ragged robes, and he was flanked by two others: the one to his left was slightly shorter, with broader shoulders and long black hair tied back in a ponytail, and he was dressed fashionably in a leather-jacket and jeans; the other was probably only average height but looked short and stout next to his statuesque friends, his hair was only a shade darker than the tallest man, and his fashion sense modest and dull. The short one was carrying a trunk, possibly baby shower gifts for the new parents they were visiting.

Harry Potter had been born yesterday.

The sky didn’t crack open and herald the Chosen One with thunderstorms and rain, the earth didn’t shake in anticipation of his birth, and the sea didn’t flood cities as a welcome into the world. At least, the Muggles didn’t see such things happening around Great Britain anyway. Arabella had a TV installed, and the way she jotted down bits and pieces of the news possibly meant she was responsible for seeing if the Muggles had clues on Death Eater activities they passed off as bizarre occurrences but which the wizards would know was the work of Death Eaters. Chara just tried not to be bored to death by the news.

She was watching keenly but nothing interesting had happened so far. Not even seeing Remus Lupin, Sirius Black and Peter Pettigrew counted as interesting; she just saw their backsides, not their fronts.

Chara didn’t try to draw Arabella’s attention to the trio. They didn't pose any immediate threat to the Potters—not yet anyway.

Her stare must’ve been pretty intrusive, or the guy just had really sharp instincts because the dark one turned around to look right at her, ponytail swishing.

She couldn’t see the expression on his face and he didn’t linger after seeing who was watching him and his friends intently.

Like the Death Eaters, the members of the Order of the Phoenix saw Arabella in a belittling manner: a non-threat, a prop in the scenery.

Chara personally thought people like Arabella had it best.  They get to stay alive—unlike the men that had just walked in.

-x-

Mrs Denny would’ve been so touched she’d weep buckets if she knew what Chelsea—well, Chara now—was doing. She was _reading_ a newspaper when previously she considered them useful only for covering up dog turd. Then again, she had never been so deprived of modern entertainment. The TV shows on air were sadly not up to her standards, and Arabella only had boring historical romances; she had very few books or tomes on the wizarding world except for Kneazle-related reading, and after three manuals of how to breed and best care for Kneazles, Chara was sick of it.

The Daily Prophet had to suffice.

Chara could fill up the crosswords mentally—she couldn’t quite hold a pencil right yet—and peruse the comic strips of the _The Adventures of Martin Miggs, the Mad Muggle_ which was ridiculously comical. Then once those sections were exhausted, she’d flip through the pages to read about celebrities in the wizarding world, rate the products advertised, and take a look at how wizarding communities in other countries was perceiving the Wizarding War in Britain—the gist was, if Dumbledore could take down international Dark Lord Grindelwald a handful of decades ago, he ought to be able to finish off Voldemort with his hands tied behind his back. There were also a lot of conspiracy theories in the opinion section about why Dumbledore was taking so long to end this war.

How did Arabella process the fact Chara could read at the tender age of thirteen months old?

“Witch babies,” she muttered, and shuffled away after shooting a perturbed look at the toddler whose head was not visible over the newspaper.

Chara doubted Arabella had ever been in close proximity to wizard-born children before, which was lucky. Every kind of oddity Chara exhibited that no babies—Muggle or wizard—would ever show had been chalked up to and rationalised by Chara having wizard parents and was herself a witch.

Then again, Arabella was no maestro at normal. She had cats far smarter than the ordinary ones the Muggles favoured, and maybe she held wizard babies to a far higher standard than Muggle babies—and Chara was functioning as well as she expected.

But after two months of this, around the time the publisher of the _Martin Miggs_ comics decided to compile the comic strips into books instead of releasing it in sequential order in the paper, Chara decided it was time to paint some flavour into her life.

The next time Arabella went shopping, she tagged along. She had been tagging along for a while but she’d never before jumped out of the stroller to dash into the Potter cottage when they went to deliver the groceries.

“Hey!” James shouted after her, balancing the bags as he tripped after her. He was terrible at keeping uninvited persons out of his home.

“Chara!” shrilled Arabella.

“Oh!” Lily gasped when Chara rounded the red-carpeted cream-walled hallway and into the living room.

“Ew!” Chara cringed: Lily was breastfeeding the baby, and had shifted in surprise when she saw the two-foot tall intruder, dislodging Harry from her breast, and exposing way too much to Chara’s eyes.

“Waaah!” Harry wailed.

After the fuss had died down, James hauled Chara into the kitchen and had her pass him the contents of the shopping bags so that he could put them away presumably to keep her occupied rather than actually needing help; Lily had Harry resettled after poking her head in the hallway and assuring Arabella that they were welcome to stay; and Arabella was currently trading the best cat-care tips with Lily concerning Snowy, the newest addition to the Potter household. Lily had grown quite fond of the beast even though the first thing it did when it saw Chara was hiss at her.

Chara looked down at Snowy from her perch atop the kitchen table. She rummaged in the emptying grocery bag, retrieved a green apple and tossed it. Snowy dodged, yowling in offense. Chara was about to tip the entire bag over it and hope something hit when James gently shooed the part-Kneazle away.

“Don’t mind her,” James told Chara, “She hates me too. She only likes Lily.”

“Tch,” Chara said and lobbed another apple. It bounced harmlessly off the wall but Snowy was so offended she stalked out of the kitchen.

“Hey, hey, I’m the one eating that,” James chided as he strode over to pick it up.

Why didn’t he just use magic to summon it to his hands? Chara stared bemusedly at him as he bent down, blinking when the apple rolled to his left. He stretched after it and nearly overbalanced when it whizzed between his feet. James spun around to look at her. “Hey!”

“Uh?” Chara’s brows climbed. She wasn’t even doing anything!

James chased after the apple, which—judging by the circuit James was running—had started to circle the dining table. She started laughing at him, crawling to the edge to better glimpse the green blur James zipped after. “Cut it out!” he said, but he was laughing too. After a minute or two, he stopped and leaned against the dining table, panting lightly. “I’m out of shape,” he mourned. Chara was snickering at the expression on his face when, lightning-quick, he dove to the ground and came up rolling with a thrashing, defeated fruit.

“And Potter did it again!” James crowed to an imaginary crowd, holding the apple up triumphantly, glasses skewered.

Laughing, Chara clapped, deciding to play along. James made a big show of bowing to her.

“James?” Lily’s voice called. “What happened to the tea?”

“Oh, right.” James dropped the apple into the fruit bowl and dashed for the cupboards, somehow managing to put together a teapot and a teabag without breaking anything with all the clattering.

Chara crawled to the fruit bowl, plucking the same apple out of it. Rolling the curious fruit between her palms, she tried to make it grow larger or change colour or continue its previous jaunt around the kitchen—nothing. Why didn’t it work when she was focusing her intent? She hadn’t even meant to make James run around like a fool to catch it.

She perked up when a tray of biscuits and the steaming teapot floated out of the kitchen. James hefted her into his arms and trudged after it, muttering, “No funny business, Chara.” James deposited her in Arabella’s lap, which she immediately fled from, and started to pour tea.

“Was it that much fun to be putting away the groceries? I heard you two laughing all the way from here,” said Lily, favouring Chara with a smile. Chara gazed into her famed emerald eyes, noting the how the brightness of it complemented her equally striking hair, which, while darker than Chara had expected, reached her ribs. Chara then looked at the slumbering baby in her arms, cradled with so much love. His forehead was bare, as was the rest of his head, except for a small patch of fuzzy black. His left fist clutched a lock of his mother’s hair.

Chara’s heart squeezed. Maybe because the scene was too cute for words. Maybe because she was slightly jealous. Maybe she felt sorry for him and his future. In any case, she looked away, feeling distinctly uncomfortable.

“It’s fun when the apple runs from you,” James was saying cheerfully. “It was a much-needed exercise.”

“I bought them from a Muggle store,” said Arabella, bewildered. “They shouldn’t be running. Or be able to run, for the matter.”

“Apples from a wizard’s stores don’t run either, Arabella. It’s your kid who’s enchanting the apple.”

Lily made a soft sound of appreciation. “She can already use magic? That young?”

Arabella muttered, “She’s not mine.”

“She’ll be a year old next month.” Arabella sighed, at which point Chara was too far away to hear any more. Chara had slid off the couch and dashed toward the bookshelf at the corner of the room when the adults were chatting. The first book she pulled out was an album—mostly of James’s childhood and his parents. They looked old enough to be his grandparents when he was just a six- or seven-year old kid; he had his father’s hair and his mother wore glasses like he did. The next book was a brand-new history book, penned and autographed by Bathilda Bagshot.

Chara put away the history text and browsed the spines of the books. There were old issues of _Transfiguration Today_ and they might’ve been interesting if the theories mentioned and proposed didn’t fly beyond Chara’s bar of comprehension. There weren’t many diagrams to make sense of things. Tossing it aside, she pulled out a Herbology book and this, at least, had pictures of plants growing into beautiful flowers or man-eating monsters. There was even a plant that grew edible meat which apparently tasted like mutton.

Chara was examining an Arithmancy chart in an old textbook when Arabella called out her name.

She was unceremoniously plucked off the ground. “Look at the mess you made,” the Squib chided. She had her handbag dangling on the crook of her elbow: she was ready to leave.

“It’s okay, Mrs Figg,” Lily said, jumping to her feet—having passed the sleeping Harry Potter to James. She hid a wince as she stood, gazing wearily at the mess that Chara had made on her floor though she did not look mad; she snapped her fingers and the books Chara had strewn around returned obediently to the bookshelf, not a page out of place.

Lily showed them to the door after James said goodbye, accompanying them as far down the hallway before heading upstairs to the nursery.

“Maybe Harry will be awake next time,” Lily told Chara, who was trying to get Arabella to put her down. Did she mention how much she hated being touched—or held, especially held—by a woman?

Chara grunted, whacking Arabella’s arm, and pointing at the ground.

Lily eyed Chara curiously as Arabella leveraged her onto her feet. “She’s very … what’s the word, independent? She doesn’t like being held?”

“No, Chara hates it,” said Arabella blandly. “I’ve been kicked and punched for trying to carry her anywhere ever since she can walk.”

Arabella didn’t have to make Chara sound like a wife-beater or something.

“Oh … well, it’s the opposite with Harry. He wails when we put him down.” As if on cue, a wail echoed from within the cottage, as Lily had yet to close the door. Lily laughed but there was an undercurrent of hysteria and helplessness in it. “Hear that?” Upon closer observation, the bags under her eyes were heavy and purple, her hair dishevelled.

After exchanging final pleasantries and Lily had closed the door, Arabella scrutinised Chara. “I guess that’s one good thing about you—you never cry.”

“No,” Chara agreed.

The habit had burned away on a stove, another lifetime ago.

-x-

Time crawled by like a man made to crawl over a bed of nails.

It was slow, frustrating and painful—waiting for something to happen, for her body to grow, for her magic to develop further. Barring the apple incident in the Potters’ kitchen, Chara had not displayed any kind of magic that would imply she was a witch. The sights in Godric’s Hollow became boring once she’d seen it in all seasons—blossoming with flowers in spring, haloed by a harsh sun in summer, burnt leaves falling like tears in autumn and chillingly pale and beautiful in winter.

Chara supposed it was morbid, bordering on unkindness, to be waiting for the murders of James and Lily Potter, especially since they had been very accommodating toward her.

Chara paid them the occasional visits, and each time, Harry was older and more mobile, and accordingly the wizard toys they bought for him (through owl-mail order) were more advanced in accordance to his newfound agility. She may not be a real infant but the toys had been amusing—most of them were animated and sentient enough to wail in terror and flee from her fists—particularly when she moved them just an inch out of baby Harry’s reach and he would fall flat on his face reaching it. Of course, when Lily or James looked over at the cry, she would be all over him: pulling him up, patting his head consolingly, handing him the toy and generally acting like the most considerate baby in the universe.

The only time she’d slipped up on the good behaviour was when Peter Pettigrew came over.

It was the first time she met him and it had been jarring because he looked nothing like she expected—granted, none of the characters remotely resembled the actors who portrayed them beyond the basic descriptions like red-hair, pale skin and stout. He was on the portly side and his hair was fair and receding from his hairline, presumably from stress. There were pimples and freckles on his face, and his eyes were the kind of blue you’d normally associate with innocence except he clearly wasn’t. Pettigrew’s voice was like a choirboy’s, soft and almost musical.

He’d bought Harry an early Christmas present because he was going to be absent on the real day. Chara had picked it up and, before anyone realised what she was planning on doing, chucked it into the fireplace.

“Chara!” Lily gasped, the first to recover from the shock. She raised her wand and extracted the burning present from the fireplace, leaving it to hover in the air, still burning merrily.

“Bad,” Chara insisted, pointing at Pettigrew, who sputtered and averted his gaze when Chara tilted her head and stared him down.

“No, he isn't,” James said, folding his arms and frowning reprovingly at her, in a mocking sort of way meant to elicit humour. “What you did  _was_ bad. Harry’s devastated! Look!” He gestured to his toddler son, who at almost five months old, could already lift his head off the ground and stare appreciatively at the burning present. Harry cooed and giggled, looking far too happy to be seeing something burning to ashes before his eyes.

James coughed after a beat. “Well, he _will_ be.” Chara didn’t attempt to disguise her snort.

Lily frowned, getting to her feet and approaching the present which still hovered in front of her, beginning to crumple into black ash. “Something’s wrong.”

“Yes, and it’s burning in front of our very eyes,” Wormtail said.

“I know that—I can’t seem to put—it— _out_ —!” Lily flicked her wand a little harsher and verbalised the incantation this time: “Finite Incantatem!”

The adults reared back when the fire intensified in a burst of light that made Chara’s eyes squint and paint the light brown walls white. When the fire died, ashes and bite-sized pieces of the wrapper drifted to sprinkle on the Potters’ red-carpeted living room floor. Harry shrieked in admiration and beat the ground in hearty approval; the little guy was starting to grow on Chara.

Wormtail stared at the remains of his gift in dismay.

“You can just owl another one,” James suggested, clapping him on his shoulder. He towered over his friend by two heads.

Lily was making flowers bloom from the tip of her wand, apparently befuddled. “My wand’s still working,” she observed, and proceeded to Vanish the mess on her floor before turning assessing eyes to Chara, who was trying to look innocent. It usually didn’t work out well for Chelsea, and she was preparing herself to be booted out of the Potters’ residence when Lily put down her wand and instead picked her up.

Chara tensed, locked her muscles down so as to not sucker-punch the woman in the face. Lily was lovely, really, but she—hated—being—held. _Especially_ by women.

“Careful, Lily,” James said from beside them, “She might set you on fire.” He sounded like he was only half-joking.

 _Not intentionally, mind you!_ Chara thought. To her perpetual irritation, her magic really was accidental all the time. Nothing happened whenever she wanted it to; instead, things happened when she wasn’t even aware of wanting it to happen. It made her feel like her magic was sentient and out of her control, and it was unnerving. She could set Lily on fire, accidentally, just because she was nervous about being held like this.

But Lily disregarded him, and Chara’s internal pleas, and instead hugged her to her chest. Chara was so astonished her muscles slackened. “It’s all right, Chara, we didn’t forget about you. We definitely have presents for you, too. In fact, I’m almost finished with making yours.”

Chara made a disbelieving noise in the back of her throat. Lily thought she was _jealous_?

“No,” said Chara in a strained voice. “You w’ong.”

“So much jealousy packed into such a little body,” James remarked, sidling up behind his wife to pinch Chara’s cheek. “Tsk, tsk.” But it sounded more playful than reproachful.

Chara sighed.

Chara absolutely did not want to celebrate Christmas with them. It was awkward—she was of no significant relation to them (especially since the other Marauders, barring Wormtail, she’d never met before would be there), and it would feel too much like intruding, like peeping on someone in the bathroom. Arabella didn’t do Christmas either; to Arabella, Christmas was a day to board up the house and knit sullenly in a gloomily-lit living room with her cats curled in her lap, draped around her shoulders and snuggled up to her ankles.

For once, Chara wanted to spend the day with Arabella over the Potters.

This Christmas would be the first—and last—celebration they'd have together. Chara didn't want to impose herself on them on this special day; there was no need to accommodate a near-stranger on a day you were supposed to share with family. Chara was just a bystander, an anomaly, unnecessary even if Lily and James were too nice to make a mention of it.

So, on that morning, despite a tiny part of her lamenting the lack of décor and fanfare in Arabella's house, she faked coughs, sniffles and fatigue to get out of it. Chara had a lot of practice in her previous life pretending to be sick and pulling fast ones over her foster carers, every failed attempt sharpening her skills. During the winter, with Arabella's hands chilly from the cold, Chara's temp seemed to be higher than normal. Her inexperience in general let Chara get away without too much scrutiny—the woman didn't even own a thermometer.

Chara privately felt relief, even though a not-insignificantly-small part of her shrivelled in disappointment when James came knocking and cheerfully called for her that evening. She, having just finished a bowl of Arabella's gross pea-laden porridge, shrunk into the mattress of her crib and prayed for him to quickly go away before she changed her mind and give into the part of her who wanted to experience a wizarding Christmas.

There was a creak.

"Chara?"

She suppressed a groan—why did James have to come upstairs? She remained immobile and pretended to be asleep though she opened her eyes the slightest bit to survey the situation; she was slightly taken aback to see James boldly striding about with a pair of antlers that were definitely not attached to a headband—they sprouted from the sides of his skull.

"She's asleep," whispered Arabella, appearing at James's elbow. "She's been under the weather since she woke up this morning. I wouldn't go in there if I were you," added Arabella hastily, when James placed one foot over the threshold, "You might catch whatever she has and bring it back to your son."

"Oh," James sounded genuinely crestfallen. The light in the hallway silhouetted him, and prevented her from seeing the expression splayed on his face. "That's really too bad. We were looking forward to celebrating it together. But I guess she needs the rest … I'll come over with a Pepper-Up Potion later, Lily's a dab hand at them. She'll be up in a jiffy…"

Their voices faded as they retreated from the room.

Chara ruthlessly squashed down the sting of regret in her heart.

_They wouldn't really want me there; they just pity me, nothing more, nothing less._

It was best that she didn't get too attached them.

-x-

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Up next: Halloween 1981 (or, Chara's second re-birthday)


	4. Four

Four, five, six days and the world shook off last year like cobwebs and embraced the new year.

By then, Chara’s fake Umbridge-worthy coughs evolved into a full-blown, raging fever that rendered her near comatose. Her body ached, her head pounded, her temperature fluctuated, and her vision was shot. She drifted in and out of consciousness, unable to differentiate imagination from reality.

Potions were tipped down her throat, her forehead dabbed, body left to soak in a bathtub. Her fever finally broke on the seventh day, four days into the new year.

Arabella told her later that it was Black Cat Flu—a wizarding affliction. Chara asked if she grew cat whiskers or tail, but the Squib just rolled her eyes. She also told Arabella to get rid of the cats before she died but Arabella told her to shut up.

Chara grudgingly let it go.

Life went on as normal, meaning Chara started visiting the Potters again.

James got her a doll of _Amata_ from the wizarding world’s version of children book. “It’s fire-proof,” he told her smugly. Chara held the doll over the fire just to be sure until Lily yelled at James for letting her get so close to the fire in the first place.

James scoffed, “She’s a witch. A little fire won’t hurt.”

“Accidental magic isn’t full-proof protection, James.”

“Nonsense! My uncle Charlus goaded me to dive into the fireplace when I was a kid. I emerged unscathed. My entire family was _so_ proud.”

Incredulity was clear on Lily’s face, but she pushed it down before James could see it. Sometimes the differences in their upbringing showed—Lily freaked out at some of the things James let Chara or Harry do. Muggle children, as James had muttered to me before, were more fragile and gave Lily the wrong impression of Harry’s durability.

Lily gave her something more sensible—a scarf. She beckoned Chara closer and looped the winding fabric round her neck. Her fingers brushed Chara’s cheek.

Chara twitched backward. She was sitting close enough to the fire that the movement caused one of the scarf’s end to end up in the fireplace, singeing—

“At least the ugliest bit’s gone,” James joked when he rescued the scarf. “Or not. I can’t tell which part is the one you’d want gone.”

“Someone sounds like he wants to go without presents for the whole year,” Lily quipped.

Lily didn’t make good on her threat obviously.

James’s birthday came and went late-March and she did get him something, judging from James’s buoyant mood. They had a quiet evening together, with Arabella and Bathilda Bagshot present as well. Poor baby Harry looked horribly confused when he saw them—to his underdeveloped vision, it was like he was seeing double or one of them had reproduced by binary fission.

The highlight of the evening was the lycanthropy-inflicted guest. Chara gawked unashamedly at him—at the fresh scars on his face. He’d applied yellowish-green paste, like pus, on the scars but didn’t bandage them so the raw newness of it was appalling.

Lupin didn’t linger. He gave James something that was too small for Chara to make out, squeezed Lily’s arm in lieu of an embrace, patted Harry’s head—briefly and lightly, like he was scared he was contagious—exchanged courteous words with the old ladies, and smiled at Chara. This all finished in about fifteen minutes, and he was out of the door.

Lily stared after him with knitted brows. Chara saw a glint of suspicion in her eyes. Lily bit the inside of her cheek, glanced at James who stared forlornly at where his friend had gone, and looked away like she was shelving a difficult task for later.

If they ever had a row about Remus’ loyalties, Chara didn’t hear it, and didn’t care to know—it was private business.

The next time Chara saw any of the other Marauders, it was a dinner with Wormtail. She flicked her broccoli and potatoes at him and was encouraging Harry to do the same, to James’ perpetual amusement. Lily ended up putting her in the living room and spoon-feeding her—it was a war of atrocity that drew to a natural end with Lily Potter as the victor.

In retrospect, the closest Chara had ever felt contented was here, with the Potters.

It was an idyllic life while it lasted.

And then:

Halloween.

…

It was like watching a movie you’d watched two, three times before. You knew what was going to happen, but you can’t stop it. No, this was worse than a movie.

This—this was real, this was happening right now. There was no remote control and a convenient pause button.

You don’t even have the option of pressing the fast-forward button to get it over with.

You can’t do anything but watch.

…

_“Happy birthday, Chara! Look forward to seeing you later!”_

Chara stared at the talking card with the blank incomprehension common to someone who’d just woken up to be greeted by a talking object first thing in the morning. She reached out for the pumpkin-orange card. The words were gold and embossed, its edges outlined in black. Animated bats and creepy-smiled pumpkins grinned at Chara.

She poked the embossed script out of curiosity and felt a rush of warmth gripping her when the words replayed Lily and James’ voices; this time, she could hear Harry’s babbling in the background.

She smiled.

Then she heard a sharp intake of breath.

She looked up in surprise to see Arabella gawking at her. “You… smiled…” She said that with a voice best reserved for when you’d strike jackpot on a lottery.

Chara wiped the smile off immediately, cheeks heating up. Arabella shook her head. “I thought someone broke in, but it’s just a recording. Oh, well, happy birthday—though I don’t see what’s the point in celebrating the day your mother abandoned you.”

Even if she hadn’t stopped smiling by then, Arabella’s words definitely would’ve scrubbed it off her face.

As daylight waned into twilight, and children’s laughter started to fill the streets in preparation for Halloween celebrations, Arabella wrestled Chara out of her pajamas and into a shirt and suspenders.

Chara felt like throwing up.

She wanted to see them one last time but staying too long was risky and she was afraid she couldn’t keep her composure.

As Arabella led Chara through the familiar streets, the girl wondered if Wormtail was currently steeling himself in front of the mirror or anything else, ready to sell his friends out for glory.

A gaggle of children were harassing a row of houses as they passed by. Arabella sniffed. “I’m turning off all the lights and closing my curtains.”

“Tha’ wha’ you al’eady do,” Chara said.

“And I’m leaving you at the Potters for the night. Today is going to be my holiday,” Arabella continued.

“ _What_?”

Chara stopped dead in her tracks but Arabella hauled her on – just in time to save Chara from being trampled by a pair of sixth-graders. “No, I can’t,” she said. Chara had never slept over at the Potters before, despite spending plenty of time there.

“You like it there,” Arabella reminded her, looking confused. Then she stopped: they had arrived.

Chara tugged half-heartedly at her arm to free it from the Squib’s grip, but only dragged her feet when Arabella marched her onward and rang the doorbell.

James threw open the door with his usual crooked grin and no-wand policy. You wouldn’t think there was a war going on with his carefree attitude – even before the Fidelius Charm was cast, he was like this.

“Evening, Arabella, and—” James frowned when he saw the look on Chara’s face. “That’s some expression our special guest is wearing.”

Chara grunted humourlessly. She jumped when she heard a loud bang from inside. James pinched the bridge of his nose. Looking up, she belatedly noticed that his hair was powder white on the left side.

Then, Lily’s voice called: “Is she here already?” She sounded panicked.

“Wha’s goin’ on?” Chara blinked.

“It’s a war zone in there,” James said as Chara squeezed past him to find the source of the loud noise.

Chara found Lily in the kitchen, her red hair in a messy ponytail. Her cheek was smeared with flour, like war-paint and her expression was flustered. She couldn’t tell if Lily was giving it a snowy makeover or she’d mess up another recipe. Petunia might be the homely, magicless sister but she was also the sister gifted with culinary talent: Lily’s cooking was—terrible, just terrible—to say the least. Once in a blue moon it was edible but most of the time it was not. James was the better cook between the two and did do most of the cooking.

Lily looked ruefully down at the toddler who toed at the floor experimentally. “Look at the mess I’ve made.”

James clanked into the kitchen doorway. “I told you to stick to one recipe, but nooo – you’ve to mix them up to be special. We should’ve just bought a cake and be done with it.”

Lily tossed her hair in defiance, but the flour smeared on her cheek couldn’t hide the pinkish tint of embarrassment colouring her cheeks.

“Ready to admit defeat?” James teased.

“…Hn.”

James stepped into the kitchen, careful to avoid whatever Chara was drawing on the ground, and pecked Lily’s cheek. Chara looked up briefly at the PDA but lost interest quite quickly.

“I’ll go over to Bailey’s Bakery and get something the squirt likes.”

“Wait!” Chara tripped over in her haste to grasp at James. He looked down, brows arched. “I go wi’ you,” she insisted.

James pondered on this for a moment, then realised Chara would probably get in the way when Lily was still trying to salvage her wounded pride. “OK, come along, you can pick your favourite. We’ll be back before you know it,” he said to Lily.

“James, the Fidelius Charm—”

“Relax, we’re safe. It’s Wormtail,” James said the last part like it should settle everything. As if Wormtail was too much of a spineless rat to do anything as galling as selling them out. As if Wormtail could be anything but a loyal, unassuming sidekick blindly following James’s orders. In truth, this kind of person was the worst, the sort you should be wariest of all.

“At least take your wand with you,” Lily insisted.

James turned his cheek and rolled his eyes in an exaggerated manner so that only Chara could see; loudly, he said, “All right,” and left in the direction of the living room to find his wand.

There was a brief scuffle as James wrestled his wand away from Harry, who was using it in lieu of a teething ring, resulting in a lot of screaming, but they were finally ready to leave.

When Chara looked back, halfway to the limit of the property, she saw that the expression on Lily’s face mirrored the anxiety she felt.

Steeling herself, she followed James out of the house.

Because he had long-since realised she fared well when he carried her as opposed to when Arabella or Lily did, James picked her off the ground and swung her onto his shoulders. The world was different from atop James’s shoulders—smaller somehow, less intimidating. She rested her chin on James’s head, feeling the wild curls of his hair tickling her sensitive skin.

He took his sweet time meandering down the streets, head twitching in the direction of some small children.

“You like lotsa kids?” asked Chara, tugging on his hair for his attention. She repeated the question when he let out a confused, “What?”

“Oh, yeah. I was an only kid, and I don’t have close cousins—Uncle Charlus and Aunt Dorea’s only son died in infancy—so it got lonely sometime. I’d like it if Harry has a few siblings. Not Weasley-many, but … enough. You know, Chara, maybe—”

Whatever James had wanted to suggest, Chara never heard it as a bunch of Muggle children came then, crowding around James trick-or-treating. He produced his wand with a flourish and magicked into existence a shower of sweets that had the children squealing in delight, distracting them enough for him to extricate himself.

They reached the bakery in a few long strides. Chara looked at the sign, crestfallen—not at the lack of birthday cake, but at the prospect of returning so early. “It’s … closed.”

James said, “Oh, really?” Then he tapped his wand on the door, and invited himself in. The bell rang, but no shop owner came charging in to expel them.

In Chara’s private opinion, James ought to be made to answer in the Misuse of Magic office. “I’ve seen them keep the cakes in boxes here before,” he said, more to himself than to Chara, picking his way through the darkened shop with ease. They could hear the hum of the refrigerators—or as James called them, boxes—and their breathing.

James banged his knee against the till once, cursed, and hopped one-legged the rest of the way to where the cakes were. He somehow managed to keep Chara seated. She giggled.

“Ooh… arghh…”

“Shh,” said Chara, sobering. He was making enough noise to wake the dead.

“So merciless,” James mumbled. He straightened, reached up and plucked Chara off her high perch. He set her gently down on the floor. “We can’t really see anything,” he observed with remarkable perception, and before Chara could stop him, he tapped the glass and said, “Lumos.”

Refrigerators ran on electricity. And what was modern technology if not such machineries?

Chara flattened herself against James’s legs just in time to avoid a hail of sparks as the fridge—short-circuited? Was that the right word to describe what happened when magic and technology mixed together? The doors flew open, and she glimpsed an array of colourfully arranged cakes before James seized her by the shoulder and retreated. The fridge shuddered on the spot, churned out smoke and vomited several showers of sparks before it died down; inside, the cakes had sizzled. By then though, they had woken the owners who lived upstairs.

“Oops,” James said.

“Technology,” Chara said by way of explanation.

James scooped her up and dashed out of the shop, bells ringing after them. Adult Muggles out in the streets, presumably supervising their children, shouted at him. James laughed and sprinted off, in the opposite direction of the Potter cottage.

“Whoa!” Being carried like a football was a new experience, but extremely uncomfortable. James almost mowed down a passer-by when he whipped into a narrow alley that broke up the row of shops from another row of shops, but he sidestepped just in time and kept going. Upside down, Chara stared at the man they passed. At first, she thought he was part of the Halloween festivities, decked out in long, flowing robes.

Then she saw the red eyes.

Her eyes widened, but he was gone the next blink: a swish of black, and he vanished into the shadows provided by the alley.

It took Chara a few precious seconds to find her voice: “Stop! James!” But like most words out of her mouth, they only sounded articulate in her head and to her ears, to James it probably did not even sound like his name. She tried a different name: “Daddy!”

James skidded to a halt, breathless, and stunned. He looked down at her with wide, surprised eyes.

She had no time to decipher what other emotion might lay beneath the surprise: she had his attention, that was the important thing. She gesticulated wildly at the alley they had left behind. “Vol’emort!”

“What did you say?”

“Dark Lord! Lily an’ Harry ‘re in dan’er!”

No dawning comprehension on James’s face there; Chara had butchered her pronunciation in her haste to get the words out. She was saved the trouble of explaining when they both felt it: a wave of power so profound it chilled Chara to the bone and drew the muscles behind James’s back taut.

She could, sometimes, feel it: auras. Flitting between the Potters’ house and Arabella’s place had made her realise the sheer difference between their homes—why she felt more comfortable in the Potters’ cottage than at Arabella’s, and it wasn’t because of the felines either. The Potters each radiated a sort of aura that, when Chara entered, she felt as comfy as slipping under a duvet after a long, warm bath; Arabella’s thin film of aura and the bare flickers she felt in the cats made her feel stripped naked.

“Lily, Harry,” breathed James in horror. “Chara, you have to hang on—tightly.”

“O—kyaa!” James had plastered her over his shoulder. She had barely scrabbled for purchase in the collar of his shirt before he was melting away. She yelled in shock when he lurched forward, bending at the waist, and she was quite abruptly seated atop a four-legged, regal stag. Her fingers were clutching at soft fur.

She felt the flex of the stag’s muscles under her—in preparation for movement—and she quickly wrapped her arms around the antlers, a part of her not completely swamped with shock at his Animagus transformation had enough sense to hang on tight.

And then they were off, plunging into the darkness.

As wind whipped her cheeks apple-red, Chara marvelled at the fairy-tale-like quality of the situation she was in. She was riding a stag as large as James was tall, and the complicated weave of its antlers made it so that Prongs was hardly any shorter than James.

Chara blinked, hard, but the vision didn’t shatter. Prongs took to the forest—a clear, direct cut to the cottage. She kept her head low, let Prongs’ antlers shield her from the branches and leaves; his antlers were sturdy and powerful, like the rest of him, and they cut through dipping branches like hot knives through butter, unimpeded. Prongs leapt over a particularly thick branch and she grunted but bore it as well as the jolt as he landed.

Some part of her wished the ride to never end, but they had to reach Lily.

Prongs burst through the fringe of the forest, dust and twigs and dead leaves exploding in his wake, and galloped the rest of the way until the cottage came quickly into sight—Godric’s Hollow was a small village.

As quickly as he transformed into Prongs, James returned. She slid off his back, but his arm caught her before she hit the ground. He put her on the ground, shouted, “Stay where you are!” over his shoulder at her and was off, surging through the open gates—they had closed it when they left, earlier.

Chara stared, frozen, for only a second before she was running after him, as fast as her small legs could carry her. She was so high-strung that a small, sleek shape darting at her startled a scream out of her when she neared the gates: she backtracked and tripped in her haste, and only then she recognised the lissom shape of a feline: Snowy, rushing for help.

She got to her feet. Closer to the cottage, she heard voices.

Sounds.

Harry’s ear-piercing wailing, and James’s voice—even the distance could not muffle the raw pain: “ _Lily_ —”

Then she heard it, incongruent with the despair James’s voice radiated, a high, cold laugh, and a voice to match it:

“… I _saw_ you, James Potter, running down the streets, fleeing with your tail tucked between your legs. Poor Lily Potter, abandoned by her husband to fend for herself and her child … Lord Voldemort had to put her out of her misery.”

Laughter. It incited Harry to start crying again, loudly. Voldemort stopped laughing, abruptly.

Then, unmistakably: “Avada—”

“No!” And James cast the first spell in the ensuing duel. Chara ducked into the threshold of the cottage when the glass shattered from the force of the spells being exchanged. She could hear Harry in the background, terrified.

The walls shook, dust fell from the ceiling as she stumbled to the stairs.

She couldn’t hear the incantations as something was blasted apart, as the wall of the nursery crumbled and rubble started falling. Through the open door, she could see a slab of rock hitting the ground. She started up the stairs.

Reached the top, rounded the corner, saw lights blazing from the room of the nursery. Pressed herself close to the wall and inched to it, tentatively poking her head through it.

James and Voldemort were duelling, but it looked to Chara as if only James was exerting effort: across him, Voldemort looked vaguely amused, not breaking a sweat. Whether they had begun the battle that way, she did not know but it seemed unlikely, for James and Voldemort exchanging spells over Lily’s body. The crib, with Harry in it, was usually in the centre, but James must’ve used a spell to drag it to a corner of the room, away from the line of fire.

As Chara watched, Voldemort fired a Killing Curse at James, that forced him to dodge—it was a fatal mistake. James tripped over Lily’s outstretched arm, lanky body lost its balance. The second Killing Curse had left the tip of Voldemort’s wand before James could right himself.

_No_ , thought Chara, horrified.

A slab of rubble, roof tiles from the collapsed roof, leapt from the heap and spun into the curse’s path. It exploded, showering dust everywhere, and the impact of it threw James back like a doll; he hit the wall with a sickening crack of his head and did not get up.

_Get up, get up!_

Chara’s eyes flew back to Voldemort when she noticed movement on his part. Swish of black robes. Crimson eyes fixed on her, then to the rubble, and narrowed. She trembled, both hands clutching the front of her shirt. Then, as if on cue, Harry drew a renewing breath and cried again.

Voldemort rounded on him.

Chara receded from the doorway, slid to the ground, weak-kneed.

She heard, but did not see:

“Avada Kedavra.”

Green light spilled into the hallway, brushed the small shadow Chara’s huddled form cast.

And this time, fate went according to script.

Except for the unconscious but still alive James Potter.

Except for the reincarnated toddler out in the hallway, ears ringing with the last screams of the Dark Lord.


	5. Five

Was it five minutes or five hours?

Chara didn’t know, but she became aware of movement and sound. James had not woken yet, and Harry had cried himself to miserable, confused sleep. She had moved in that time to stand vigil by James’s side. She had checked on Lily first, looked for a long time at those unseeing emerald eyes—its vibrancy had faded in death to the dark green of moss that might cling to derelict buildings. The eyes freaked her so much she closed them.

Then she had noticed the wand close-by. It was bone-white, like the one Voldemort had held in his hands. It was, she realised with a jolt, his. It must’ve rolled toward Lily in the shockwave. She was crawling toward it before she knew it and was lifting it to eye-level. It pulsed with a kind of power that sent pleasant tingles up her arm.

She shoved the wand into the inside of her pullover, ignored the way it pressed against her when she moved and went to James, and sat there, lost as to what to do. She could not administer first-aid for him, not possessing the magical means or knowledge to do so.

Thus, she looked around, hopeful when she heard the first scuffle of footsteps.

She reared back at the sight of Wormtail, filling up the doorway.

His blue eyes were watery with fright, his skin sheet-white, as if a vampire had just drained him. He yelped and ducked when the heap of rubble suddenly flung its entire stack at him. He emerged unscathed but for dust in his hair and powdery cheeks.

The way his eyes flickered between the remains of the rubble and her reminded her of the way Voldemort had gazed at her, five minutes or hours ago.

He toed the threshold to the nursery, uncertain to approach—he wanted to check if James and Lily were breathing, to see if they were dead, she realised.

Then, miracles of miracles, a new step of footsteps—these quick and hurried. “James! Lily! Harry!” It was a voice unfamiliar to her, but Wormtail made a horrible, strangled sound in recognition. He turned and ran out into the hallway and she heard the unmistakable crack of Apparition, just as footsteps thundered up the stairs and the new arrival charged into the room, wand raised to fight a duel long over.

He lowered his wand when he realised the threat was gone.

He was a handsome wizard, and in other circumstances, Chara would’ve appreciated all the way his features—straight nose, high and haughty cheekbones, striking grey eyes and strong jawline—made him the most attractive bloke she’d ever seen, in either lives. As it was, she only appreciated his features enough to put a name to his face: Sirius Black. She’d seen him in the pictures of the Marauders as schoolboys before.

He took one look at Lily and knew she was a lost cause. He rushed to James’s side instead, checked his pulse.

Chara could see the way some of the tension left his shoulders when he felt a pulse. Sirius tossed her a precursory look before he went to examine Harry’s aliveness. The boy was even drooling in his sleep for crying out loud, and the rise and fall of his torso as he breathed was immediate—Sirius just wanted to be thorough.

He paced, then he lifted his wand, and cast, “Appare Vestigium.”

Gold mist exuded from the tip of his wand. He trailed after the gold dust, muttering under his breath. The wand pressing against her side vibrated at the signs of magic but Chara gave no outward reaction and just watched. Golden footsteps littered the red carpet, appearing and disappearing. She saw her own footsteps, and—

“Wormtail,” Sirius snarled, eyes locked on the set of footprints that had not moved past the doorway.

Chara realised with a jolt he was tracking the magical activity in the room, and the footsteps appeared in descending order from which they were created.

Before she could do or say anything, Sirius was chasing after Wormtail’s footsteps which receded out of the room and down the hallway, and was gone with an ear-piercing crack.

She wasn’t sure how long passed before she heard sounds from downstairs again. Feet were thudding up the stairs again—boy, so many important people had gone up it today in quick succession—and this time it was none other than Albus Dumbledore. She’d never seen him before, but she didn’t need to: you knew who he was the way you knew where the sun was because he radiated power in rolling waves. Whereas Voldemort had been cold as ice, his aura was warm, scorching. Like summer sun on skin, after hours.

His beard reached his waist, silver, grey and white. His eyes were the brightest blue she’d ever seen on anyone, and they swept across the room, processing everything in one fell swoop.

“Arabella,” he said clearly, and the woman appeared from behind him, gasping when she saw Chara alive and intact—as if she had already envisioned what it would be like without Chara around. “Arabella, take Chara back to your home.”

“Oh, oh, all right—but what about?”

“I will take the infant and James with me, Lily …” His voice dipped, noticeably. “I will send someone for her later. The Muggles are converging. The Fidelius Charm has broken. Quickly now, Arabella.”

The Squib nodded. She came over to Chara, and it showed how spooked she was that Chara did not bat Arabella away. She remained stiff in Arabella’s hold, but the stress of the evening was taking its toll on her and her muscles slackened despite her instinctive reaction.

Chara surrendered to the welcoming darkness of slumber.

-x-

Arabella did not sleep a wink.

She had already turned in for the evening when Snowy came to wake her and alert her of the danger. she had not known what Dumbledore had been doing but he had answered her calls after many delays. She kept a portrait in her house of a former Headmaster—who was also her ancestor—who could pass messages from her to Dumbledore.

He answered, after a lengthy delay. There was a smudge in his half-moon glasses, a speck of dust in his beard, and the lines were deeper in his forehead. He had been held up in a fight in Bath, coincidentally—or not—where his old friend Elphias Doge and his family resided.

When they ventured to the Potters’ Cottage, visible and destroyed, with Muggles starting to notice it, she expected to find everyone dead.

_My fault, oh Merlin, I left her there, I left—_

Then she ascended the stairs and saw that, of all those who had been under the roof, Chara was the only one conscious, and alive.

(She’d learn later James and Harry were alive, but at that time only Chara seemed to have survived.)

She brought Chara back from the wreckage. The toddler had fallen asleep on the way back, and Arabella didn’t want to rouse her by bathing her or even changing her clothes—even though they were sorely in need of change. Dust speckled her from head to toe.

Chara was a grouchy, unlovable brat, but that did not mean Arabella had wanted her dead.

-x-

_Wormtail._

Remus could only think of him as his world crumbled around his ears while the rest of the world cheered, inexorably jubilant. He had never needed a friend’s support as he desperately needed it now.

Sirius was in Azkaban, carted off screaming of his innocence, Moody had said, as if he hadn’t been caught red-handed after blasting a street apart, killing Peter and a dozen of Muggles; he’d been the one to escort Sirius to Azkaban. Lily was dead, and James—he was alive, as was Harry, but Remus had not been allowed to see him yet.

Dumbledore, wary of further traitors, had the surviving Potters moved to a location he had not divulged to anyone else.

He waited, for that was all he could do.

He waited.

-x-

_“Daddy!”_

James woke with a start, sure that someone had called him. For one blissful second, he didn’t remember, and then the next, as wakefulness roused the rest of his brain, he did.

Chara’s birthday.

Voldemort.

Lily.

Harry.

His heart in his throat, he whirled around, terrified of the worst and found himself face-to-face with his son. Harry had been tucked in a bassinet, sleeping peacefully. Alive. He looked past Harry, half-expecting to see Chara, but no—she would be relegated to Arabella’s care.

He thought, ridiculously, of all the times Chara and Wormtail had been in the same room. She had shown unflinching, unfathomable loathing of Peter since the first time they met. Her eyes with their blue irises had narrowed in dislike right until the day her eyes had settled in stages to their permanent colour—the last time she’d seen him, the day after the Fidelius Charm was cast, and they had asked Peter over for dinner.

She kept flicking bits of her dinner at him.

What was once a fond memory was now tinged with the bitterness that came with introspective realisation.

Shaking the thought from his head, he looked around once more, taking in the white, clean sheets, the rose-patterned yellow-red wallpaper, faded with age, and the mahogany wood of the bed frames and cupboards and night tables. It looked rather like his grandmother’s country home.

Where was he?

A voice answered, “You are in one of my descendant’s homes, in Cotswold.” James’s eyes tracked the source of the voice to a portrait situated next to the door. From his many trips to the Headmaster’s office as a schoolboy, James recognised him as one of Hogwarts’ many previous Headmasters: Professor Everard.

James fired off every question he had at the portrait: Where was Lily? Where was Sirius? Remus? Dumbledore? Is Peter all-right?

The portrait of the deceased Headmaster took an infuriatingly long time to answer, speaking each word slowly, as if James’s addled brains might take a longer time to process:

“Your wife’s body is at Hogwarts. Professor Dumbledore has suggested passing on the bulk of the arrangements for a funeral to Lily Potter’s sister, a Mrs Dursley, if you are not—”

“No,” said James, strangled, “No. I… I’ll do it, of course, I will.” The thought of any Dursley arranging his wife’s funeral was unbearable. He loathed his brother-in-law, and his sister-in-law wasn’t at the top of his favourite persons list either.

“Mr Black is in Azkaban. I’m quite unsure of where Mr Lupin is—”

“What?” James exploded. “Azkaban? Why?”

“He was the agent of You-Know-Who all along, was he not?” Everard returned. “Just last night, he was brought into Ministry custody for killing Mr Pettigrew and a street full of Muggles. Mr Pettigrew had went to confront him about his betrayal, you see, and he paid the price for his courage.”

That did not make the slightest bit sense. Peter was dead? And Sirius killed him?

On second thought, it did make sense, but not for the reasons people assumed.

“Oh Merlin,” said James, burying his face in his hands. “I need to see Dumbledore. I need to talk to him—right now.”

There was so much wrong in the current predicament that James didn’t even know where to start. Sirius would never betray him. James’s faith in his friends was absolute. Even now, he wondered what had happened to Peter.

Had the Death Eaters gotten hold of his mother? Had there been a secret wife and child he never told James about that the Death Eaters were holding over him?

(Why, Pete, why?)

“Professor Dumbledore is at the Ministry for Magic for a meeting with the Council of Magical Law,” said Everard. “Please be patient. He will come, as soon as possible. If you require anything, there is a house-elf in this house to attend to your needs.”

And then he was gone, leaving James alone to his own devices.

Everard had promised Dumbledore would be present as soon as possible—it took Dumbledore three hours and thirty-eight minutes to show up. The old wizard looked his age tonight—the wrinkles on his face seemed deeper, the crow’s feet sprawling from the corners of his eyes seemed longer.

“James,” said Dumbledore, taking in how James was nursing a cup of cold tea he had only drank a few sips from. In the three-hour long wait, Harry had roused once but before James could so much as flounder, the hypercompetent house-elf Tink had appeared and presented to James a bottle of warmed milk for Harry. It had also changed Harry’s diapers with a snap of its fingers and summoned a tray of refreshments for James in the same breath.

James had no appetite. He had been drinking tea while watching Harry. He had not moved from his perch on the bed, just swung his legs to rest on the floor.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” Dumbledore continued, sincerely.

James nodded. Then, without preamble, “Peter was the Secret-Keeper. We switched, at the last minute. Sirius … he said if it was him, it would be too obvious, so he suggested Peter instead.”

“You are saying Sirius is innocent?”

“Yes.” James made himself look Dumbledore in the eye, let the man see in his memories, the truth. Dumbledore performed Legilimency so skilfully James barely felt the breach and when he left, only able to tell when an additional burden made Dumbledore’s shoulders sagged, ever so slightly. Now, in addition to rounding up the wayward Death Eaters, he had to find a way to convince the irrational Crouch to hold trials and determine the innocence of a student he himself had mistakenly sentenced to Azkaban.

“I’ll try to locate Mr Pettigrew, who I’m quite sure is alive after going through all the trouble to frame Sirius. I suspect he was unaware of your survival, James, or he wouldn’t have attempted that scheme,” said Dumbledore. His blue eyes fell onto Harry. The boy whimpered in his sleep. On his forehead was a new blemish that had not been there before Halloween: a lightning-shaped scar. “I think you should know what the entire wizarding world has been calling your son.”

“What?”

“The Boy Who Lived. They are saying he vanquished the Dark Lord.”

“That’s absurd,” said James immediately. “What happened—I didn’t even know what went on, and I was there.”

“You were not at the house,” said Dumbledore, not an accusation.

“No, no, it was … Chara’s birthday … you know, the girl with Arabella. You sent them to us.”

“I’m aware.”

“We wanted to celebrate it with her. Lily said she’d take care of the cake, and I should Transfigure candles and take care of the baby while she did it.” A smile tugged weakly at the corner of his mouth. “But you know—she’s a—she … was … a disaster in the kitchen.” A weak laugh. “The oven blew up. Flour was all over the place. So I took Chara out to the shops, to buy a cake. I didn’t—run—if I’d known, I wouldn’t have left, I wish, I wish—”

_I wish she knew._

_I wish I’d been there._

_I wish Chara had never—_

The last thought chilled.

“Then?” asked Dumbledore, coolly, and mercilessly.

James forced himself to continue. “When we got back, it was already too late. Voldemort upstairs, and Lily was …” James couldn’t say it. He looked down at the cup he was palming between his hands, saw his own anguished eyes gazing back at him from a brown reflection.

“He tried to kill Harry. We duelled, but I … I wasn’t at my best. I was angry, grieving, and terrified. Harry kept crying. I tripped, in the middle of the duel, while dodging a Killing Curse. Then he sent another one right at me. I thought it was over, but…” He shrugged. “Here I am.”

He knew Dumbledore wanted to know how, and he, too, wanted to know. He frowned at his reflection, like he was encouraging himself to think harder. “Something blocked the second curse. A brick, I think… but I don’t know how it floated there. The roof wasn’t falling at that time—it’d fallen earlier.” When Voldemort had redirected his Blasting Curse.

“It blew up and I was thrown back. I hit my head and I passed out because of that… pathetic… but before I went under, I saw—”

The memory came back with painful clarity. “Voldemort, he wasn’t looking at me or Harry, he was looking at the doorway…” _Why?_ “Like there was something, no someone, there.”

Stay where you are, James had barked at Chara, just before he ran in. And, knowing Chara, she had not listened, and had likely run right after James.

He thought of running apples and burning presents, and of floating bricks. “Chara, it must be. She followed me. Harry’s magic hasn’t manifested yet, and I don’t think he understood what green spells meant, but Chara was … she’d always been different.”

“Yes,” said Dumbledore, “I’m starting to understand that she is.”

-x-

It was shockingly normal—life after the Dark Lord’s fall.

Chara still dreamt of that night, but the rest of the world had moved on.

She followed the end of the First Wizarding War through the Daily Prophet. She insisted to peruse it first thing in the morning, ignoring breakfast in lieu of it. She saw Lily’s obituary, written by Remus Lupin of all people—Petunia Dursley and Severus Snape were out of the question of course but what of her girlfriends from school?—and she saw also the date for her funeral.

It wasn’t going to be open to the public; close friends and family only, and it was by invitation. Chara wondered if she and Arabella would be invited to go. But then the date came and went, and Arabella didn’t take her out.

Conversely, Arabella stayed indoors, packing. They were moving, she told Chara, to a town West Yorkshire. A town called Todmorden would be where their new home be. Godric’s Hollow was becoming too much of a circus: wizards and witches from all corners of the country, and maybe curious adventurers from other countries, came to spy the ruin. The place would go down in history as a place of historical importance, a heritage sight—already people were forgetting a family was torn irreversibly apart here, that a mother and wife died. They had started scribbling on the walls, leaving messages. Snowy had stood guard there but was unable to prevent them from defacing the place.

Chara had never felt sorrier for an animal then, seeing Snowy, retrieved by Arabella, looking so defeated. Snowy had been a recluse since, hiding in the darkest corners of the house, as if mourning Lily in her own way—she had loved Lily best of all.

Chara also spared some sympathy for Sirius Black, who, it seemed had been arrested. His arrest and purported involvement in the attack on the Potters, and subsequent attempt to flee that culminated in the murder of Peter Pettigrew and thirteen Muggles, had been in the same issue as Lily’s obituary. And now, after a month of being unfairly arrested, he was _still_ in Azkaban. James was fighting for him, and she saw him on the front-page more often than not. Recent issues gave the impression James and Crouch Snr were locking horns.

James insisted everyone, not just Sirius, should have a fair trial.

Crouch Snr scoffed and said resources were better turned to rounding up the wayward Death Eaters, citing the Lestranges as a critical concern.

Chara found it ironic of Crouch to say so—wasn’t his own son also a Death Eater? But Crouch did not know yet. The attack on the Longbottoms had not transpired.

The day Arabella and Chara moved to Todmorden—and they left at dawn—an owl delivered the most shocking issue of the Daily Prophet yet.

There had been an attack at the Ministry, by the Lestranges, on James. He’d been there to plead his case with Crouch and had met the man in his office where he was subsequently ambushed. Luckily, he had not been alone—Mad-Eye Moody had been there, as were other Aurors. A brutal battle ensued, James emerging unscathed, and one Death Eater dead, and two captured. Crouch Snr’s status was being ascertained at the time of printing—one of the Death Eaters had apparently disguised himself as Crouch Snr.

Chara glowered at the unhelpful pages for the rest of the ride. The identities of the Death Eaters had not been revealed, but at least she knew James was all-right.

The travel to Todmorden, all the way up north, took up almost seven hours, with Arabella’s frequent stops along the motorway to freshen herself up.

Midway, she put down the paper to ask, “Why Tod?”

“What?”

“Why go there?” Chara clarified.

“It’s not too noisy,” was all Arabella said. “I hate cities.” In her lap, Snowy purred in agreement. Because Arabella wanted to bring most of the stuff herself, she had let the cats loose at the front with them, while she squashed everything they needed to the back of the van.

They got there about noon, and because the furniture hadn’t reached, Chara took a nap in the sleeping bag while Arabella tried to get everyone else—namely, the cats—settled and fed.

When she woke up again, the house—one of the terraced houses by the canal—was not as empty as it was when she fell asleep. Arabella had unsurprisingly put up pictures of all her cats first. Chara wasn’t usually bothered by it but at that moment, seeing it made her feel troubled.

It took her a beat to realise why: she had no pictures to commemorate the Potters by. Truthfully, she felt a bit hurt that James hadn’t visited her, but he had a lot on his plate—it was forgivable, she supposed.

Chara looked away from the photo-frames crowding the fireplace’s mantelpiece when she felt one of the felines headbutting her. She was about to swat it aside when she realised it was Tufty, and in her mouth was the Evening Prophet. Chara had slept longer than she thought.

Though her stomach rumbled for food, she prioritised reading the newspaper. First thing she saw was the name Rita Skeeter.

Perusing the front page quickly, she went to the back to read up on the rest.

Apparently, James was grievously injured and was currently in St Mungo’s fighting for his life. The Death Eaters were confirmed to be the high-profile Lestranges: Rabastan had been killed, but Rodolphus and Bellatrix were in custody.

And the Death Eater masquerading as Crouch Snr? None other than their fearless leader’s own son, Bartemius Crouch Junior. Unsurprisingly, Crouch Snr’s reputation was slogged through mud by Skeeter: He was accused of everything from aiding and abetting Voldemort’s Death Eaters to embezzlement of Ministry funds to an assassination plot of current Minister for Magic Millicent Bagnold.

She scanned the newspaper again, brows furrowed. She wasn’t concerned about the Crouches’ family drama or the Lestranges’ arrest—she just—she just hoped James was OK, and that Skeeter had just exaggerated whatever minor wounds he had.

Hopefully.

-x-

In the following months following the attack on James, Chara followed the happenings in the wizarding world religiously.

Not for the first time, she resented the fact that Arabella lived so reclusively away from the rest of the wizarding world. As of now, the only manner Arabella interacted with the wizarding world was through the owl post. She had put adverts of cats she wanted to sell in the Daily Prophet and other wizarding magazines, and when someone expressed an interest, she would send the cats off by owl—it would be a comfortable journey, as the carrier was magically enlarged and had toys, food and water.

There were some speculations as to what happened to Voldemort, and apparently, the Ministry still received letters of Voldemort sightings—which turned out to be untrue all the time.

Mostly, everything was settling down.

For some reason that might or might not have to do with the fact he was accused of conspiring with Death Eaters, which according to a statement made by him months ago was automatically an Azkaban sentence, Crouch Snr had agreed to do retrials.

Of all the court cases, surely none inspired as many furious whispers as the one where he sentenced the Lestranges and his own son, Junior, to a lifelong sentence in Azkaban.

Rita Skeeter covered the Crouch and Lestranges’ case, and a few days later, she, too, reported on Sirius Black’s court case. Considering who was writing it, Chara had to take the stuff written down with a pinch of salt.

According to Skeeter, James and Crouch Snr had made a backdoor deal, so even though Sirius only had a very “flimsy” testimony from James, he got off scot-free (The Evening Prophet by another journalist rectified it by saying Sirius’s former teachers and Headmaster also testified about the trustworthiness of his character).

Skeeter also made several allegations to the “true” nature of James and Sirius’s relationship (“ _Close as brothers, their schoolmates say, or is there more? Now that Mrs Potter is conveniently out of the way…_ ”) and made a mountain out of the molehill the fact Sirius and James embraced one another in the courtroom once Black’s innocence was ruled the truth.

You had to admire her gall.

Chara stared a bit longer at the picture of James. The camera had caught his face, and Sirius’s back, in the embrace. She hadn’t heard from him since Halloween. Arabella also seemed to have been out of loops with Dumbledore: with the main threat vanquished, the Order of the Phoenix had dissolved without further fanfare.

She wondered if a part of James blamed her.

She traced his face, just once, then she turned the page.

The Potters were, quite clearly, a chapter in her life that had ended.

-x-

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Question: What do you think Crouch Jnr is up to now?
> 
> Preview: The year Chara was to turn six, Arabella threatened to have her sent to Muggle primary school. There's a time-skip.


End file.
